


Oh God, They Were Roommates

by spider_fingers



Series: a domestic zombie apocalypse (or, Let Them Be) [2]
Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Canon-Typical Violence, Daud being a dick sometimes, Gen, Pre-Slash, Zombie Apocalypse, lack of and miscommunication, some graphic depictions of wound care
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-10
Updated: 2019-08-20
Packaged: 2020-08-14 14:03:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 35,339
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20193454
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spider_fingers/pseuds/spider_fingers
Summary: It twitches and starts to turn. Eyes—bloodshot and egg-wet—zero in on him. Something in it rattles—





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> have fun reading ~*

Daud tucks his legs, lets go of the pulley and drops into a roll seconds before touching the mat. He hasn't gotten to his feet yet that the words are grumbling out:

“Why can't he stay with you?” He dusts off his knees, hikes up his pants; he's going to need that belt back. None of the things he started out with fit him all that well anymore. “He knows you better.” Despite his best efforts, the words taste of resignation—he knows the boy's made his decision and nothing he can do will change that, but he won't just lie down and accept it. He hasn't had to share his space with anyone but himself for a while.

“Mrs Moray wouldn't like it,” says the boy, looking back at him over his shoulder. “And we're already two. It's more fair this way.”

Fair has nothing to do with it. Daud grunts, lip curling. “And Copperspoon?”

“You know that won't end well.” _Never mind how protective she is of the plants and the paintings; you wouldn't know her flat's the biggest to look at it._

Daud doesn't try asking about Bái. She doesn't need an intrusion like that right now, much less the kind of trouble a vagrant can bring. The kid is right: he's the best choice, he can keep an eye out and manage any situations that arise—he's no stranger to getting his hands dirty, after all.

The one thing he refuses to do, however, is admit it.

There's the sound of feet touching down, light, and Daud turns—he didn't even hear the sound of the pulley on the rope—and sees the man from the sewer unbuckling the belt from around his chest. The raincoat the boy had let him borrow is wrapped around the zip-line behind him; he must have used it to slow his descent, make the landing easier.

Smart. Daud didn't expect it of a guy who looks like a cross between a stray dog and a rat.

The man's eyes flick up to meet his and dodge away again. He takes his time, looping the belt around his arm, untangling the coat from the line, and when he's done he stands there, head downturned, looking between them with nervous little glances.

“This is our home,” the boy says, sweeping an arm around. “It can be yours, too.”

The mat takes up a good part of the roof, but the rest is stacked with green: planter boxes sprouting stems and leaves, garbage bags full of dirt and growing shoots. The man doesn't move aside from his eyes, sweeping around, touching on each detail—his hands are shaking. It's minute, almost unnoticeable. Not for the first time, Daud considers the amount of cover there is up here, and how easily something could hide in the mess.

His eyes narrow, assessing, but there isn't much to be read in the man's stiff posture. Holed up in the sewers for who knew how long, could be military—could be anything, really. Even normal people learn to be afraid of what's behind a corner in times like this.

Daud starts for the roof access door.

“Come on, get inside,” he says, heaving it open, and ignores the boy's quizzical look as he heads in first. “Might as well show you around.”

The man comes closer, halting, taking in everything as he steps into the stairwell. Daud stops him as he passes with a hand on his arm. (He's tall, even hunched. Taller than the kid, and _he's_ a string bean.) “I'll just need that back.”

It's possible the man's stopped breathing, eyes riveted on Daud's hand. Daud lets go and he slides just out of reach, into the darker corner by the stairs. The boy, partway down the first flight, watches them with that pinch to his mouth that means he's laughing on the inside.  
Daud tugs at the loops on his pants. “The belt.”

Slow enough to be hesitant—or reluctant—the man holds it out, and Daud can finally make sure his pants aren't about to fall down. When he catches up with the boy, the smirk is visible.

Daud shoots him a glare. _Brat._ The kid sniffs and turns up his nose like he knows exactly what Daud's thinking. He probably does. He's astute for how young he is, and Daud has never claimed to be anything but predictable.

Won't fault him his good humor, though. It's been a rough week. They all need to let go a little.

The boy gestures at the doors they pass, explaining which is whose—six floors, Delilah in the double flat and closest to the roof, then Bái.

The door to the other flat on Bái's floor hangs off its hinges. “We still need to fix that,” says the kid, and goes momentarily silent. The man from the sewer still isn't speaking; he doesn't ask what happened.

Between the fifth and fourth floors the kid explains how the first floor is condemned, the windows blacked and boarded, only the front door accessible; how the flats on the second are marked with black tape, which means no one's allowed to go inside. The third floor is his and Lady Moray's, with the flat opposite acting as the communal kitchen.

“We all meet up there for dinner,” he says, “Or at least, whoever's not out. And the fourth floor is Daud's.”

_One half of it is_, Daud corrects. The other flat is mostly full of gardening supplies. They took the door off early on to block the first floor windows, and anyway, there's no space for a shed up on the roof.

The kid stops and looks to where the man is still a few steps up from the landing, hanging back. “You'll be staying here for now,” he says, “Daud can help you settle in,” and Daud has to look away. Despite how he balks at contact and barely seems to look them in the eye, there is something off in how the kid talks to him like he might to a spooked dog, quiet and slow. The man's on edge, yes—but he's sharp, too, not feral.

Doesn't make it easier how he won't talk, though. Maybe he's a mute. Maybe he just... forgot. (How long was he down there?)

Daud heads inside, leaves the door swung open as welcome. When he glances back the kid's doing a little wave, like he's saying goodbye, and the man just looks at him, one hand twitching. Those black eyes cut to Daud and the hand is tucked out of sight. Daud leaves them to it.

Back at camp, while the man slept, Daud had asked how long the kid had known he was there. The answer had been ambiguous at best. Some part of Daud wonders if the reason was guilt—the man's in bad shape and the kid knows it, from how he'd stared once the man had fallen asleep—but the rest of him knows it isn't: the boy's a little too convinced of his own infallibility, confirmed every time things turn out his way.

_I know things,_ the boy had said the first time one of his stranger decisions gave way to lucky consequences. Daud rolls his eyes and gets to work.

If he's going to have a long-term guest, he'll have to clear out the second bedroom, the one he's been using to store everything in the flat he didn't need. There's a table and a chair in the kitchen area, a shelf and a bedside table full of books in his room, a bed. The rest was unnecessary, so the living room is bare and the bathroom is hardly more than a shower stall and a sink.

Come to think of it, he's going to need a second chair now.

He brings that out of the mess first, drops it by the table and wades back in. By the time he drags a cabinet out the door to the other flat—he'll move the gardening things and find someplace to put all of this, can't have it cluttering his space—the man from the sewer is inside, his careful exploration stopped in its tracks to watch Daud hauling furniture.

Daud hesitates, then sets the cabinet down and motions for him to follow. He heads down the hall, beyond the two bedrooms.

“This is the bathroom,” he says. “Fill a bucket with water from the shower basin and dump it in the toilet over here,” he opens the door just to the right of the bathroom, “It flushes. Antiseptic solution for your hands. There's a manual pump in the basement if you want water to wash with, bucket's in the corner there. The candles are for when the sun goes down.”

The man levels a blank stare at him. Not knowing if anything he's saying computes is starting to grate.

“Right. Have fun,” he says, and returns to dragging things from the ex-storage space to the other flat.

When he's done he is sweating through his shirt, and the man from the sewer is nowhere to be seen. The bathroom door was carried off to barricade the first floor long ago, so he can tell at a glance that no one is inside, and the kitchen and living room are clearly empty.

Daud checks his bedroom first, but nothing's been disturbed. The one he's just emptied, aside from the extra bed—it's going to be small, considering how tall the other guy is, but he doesn't feel like switching with his—is just as unoccupied. He eyes the wide sliding door closet at the end of the room a moment and decides not to bother. If he's gone so far as to shut himself in there, he probably won't appreciate Daud barging in.

“Dinner's downstairs,” he calls out to the silent flat, just in case the man is listening, and only takes the time to wipe himself down with a wet towel dipped in what's left of the shower water before heading to the third floor.

Bái is at the stove. She's usually the one to deal with the evening meal, when Daud or the kid aren't there. Whatever she's stirring smells of herbs.

“I heard you brought in someone new,” she says, her back still turned. Daud makes an assenting noise. “Will they be coming down?”

“Not sure,” he says, digging through the cupboards for the plates and cutlery. “Didn't see him when I left.”

“You didn't see him?” the kid asks, darting in on Daud's heels and coming in close to the stove to sniff at the pot.

Daud's mouth slants. He shrugs. “Might be hiding. If he doesn't come down I'll bring up a plate.”

Delilah comes in last, and her nose wrinkles at the state of Daud's clothes.

“You smell rank,” she says, clear and straightforward, and pulls out her chair.

“I've been getting the kid's newest stray settled in,” Daud says, unbothered, serving everyone a plate. “Which you'd know, if you weren't a shut-in who talks to her plants.”

“They're much better fans of my work than you lot,” Delilah snipes back before digging in. In the background, Bái carefully avoids sighing and the kid watches with a sideways smile. The Lady Moray isn't here, but it's enough of a common occurrence that no one bothers asking if she'll be coming. The kid would have spoken up if she was.

“... Does he have a name?” Bái asks, a ways into dinner, her quiet voice bending the silence. The kid's shoulders tilt, head half-shaking. His mouth is too full to answer.

“I'll find out,” Daud says, and he looks up at the boy. There's a question that's been biting at him, the only one beyond 'how long'. “How did you find him? He wasn't on any of our routes.”

The kid swallows his mouthful, but doesn't say anything; pokes at his plate with his fork instead. When he does speak, it starts off slow.

“... He said... bones washed up on the shore, sometimes... and it was almost a straight line from where I'd set up camp. I just thought— I could find one, bring it back. That he'd like that.”

The table goes very quiet. Even Delilah's silence takes on a different edge.

“Where was he, then?” Bái asks, tone too sharp, and everyone knows the _him_ she means isn't the same. “Near the river, I imagine.”

“Stormwater main, thirty minutes from the coffee place,” Daud says, and the kid huffs.

“It's a Starbucks, Daud, not a _coffee place_.”

“None of them make coffee anymore. Don't see the difference.”

“He's been living in the sewers?” Bái's grip on her fork is white-knuckled, her voice still too harsh. “Are you sure he's not—” She can't quite finish the words. Her eyes haven't left her plate. They all know exactly what she's asking, and Delilah turns to them with a similar look on her face.

“Not sick,” Delilah finishes, narrow-eyed.

“He isn't,” says the kid, like he couldn't be more certain, and his words are followed by the sudden crash of something falling in the next flat over. They all turn to the door, then to him. He shrugs. “She probably knocked the coathanger over. She's fine, listen—”

He's right: at the edge of hearing, there's a quiet shuffling heading further away.

(He's only met the Lady Moray a few times during his stay, and still, Daud can almost hear her say in that low, rasping voice: _My nephew wouldn't bring disease into this house._ She's the kind of old lady he can easily imagine listening in at the door.)

Daud finishes as quick as he can. He has no patience for the unrelieved pressure in the room, the weight of their fears, the past week hanging over their heads. He leaves his plate in the sink, fills another from the pot, and goes.

Nothing has moved in the flat. He sets the full plate on the table, realizing what he'd done without thinking: the man hasn't eaten well in some time, his instincts had reasoned, and going by how gaunt his face was even under the dirt he won't last much longer at this rate. He glares at the plate.

Daud doesn't know how to show it's for the man who must be hiding. Can he even be certain he's still in this flat? That he'll come back, if he isn't?

Daud clenches his teeth and shrugs to himself. Not his problem. If the plate is still full in the morning, he'll eat it himself.

His eyes open to full darkness and Daud doesn't question, for a moment, why he woke in the middle of the night. It happens. He can't entirely recall a point when his sleep was last restful.

Then the sounds register. He frowns. His heartrate picks up. They're coming from the closet.

Daud has not been a child for a long time, and even then he was the type to snidely tell children his own age or older that monsters didn't exist—but it takes him a long handful of seconds to stop wondering how a walker could have crawled inside his closet and start remembering the man he hasn't seen all evening. Case in point: now that he's paying attention, it sounds like mumbling, quiet and unclear, muffled like conversation through a door.

Daud huffs and swings his legs out of bed. Of course he'd choose Daud's room to hole up in; it'd probably been the quietest part of the flat all afternoon, aside from the bathroom. For a moment, the mumbling stops—then starts up again, no louder. Daud resigns himself to being awake, and pads to the kitchen.

They keep a jerrycan of drinking water in each of the flats to avoid daily trips to the basement pump. Glass in hand, he sits in the square of faint light the moon draws on the living room floor. He'll start closing the shutters in the winter, to keep the cold out when it really hits—but for now, he likes having this when the nights are too short.

It isn't long before his eyelids start feeling heavy again—fine by him: sometimes the wakefulness lasts until morning—and he heads back to his bedroom, the murmur low. He sits on the edge of the bed, head nodding, and thinks of the old mattress folding around him, and the blankets, cold at first, then warming with his body—

The sounds grow louder, harsher, muffled and omnipresent. He won't be getting to sleep like this.

His heels rap sharp against the floor as he crosses the room, and the sounds stop abruptly.

For a moment he considers leaving it at that—but he's up, and standing in front of the closet, and the man from the sewer can't be staying in there indefinitely, so he might as well go through with it. He slides the closet door open.

“Jesus _Christ—_”

The huge shape nearly bowls him over tearing out through the opening and Daud finds himself on the ground, closet door rattling in its rails but undamaged, his hand groping for the knife he doesn't wear to bed. He can hear it— hear _him_ skid on the hallway floorboards, heavy resounding steps in quick succession then nothing—either the man's found another place to hide or he's switched to creeping around.

Daud isn't going to find out. He gets up—must have wrenched something going down, his whole left side twinges—and closes the door, then drops into his bed with a groan. Hopefully the door will be enough of a deterrent he won't wake up to the guy sneaking back in.

The plate is gone in the morning. Daud is checking the lock on the front door when he sees the empty space and pauses, senses on hyperalert for the second it takes to remember: _Right._ He has a guest now, and tangible proof in the twinge in his side, though a few hours of sleep took care of the worst of it.

The plate will turn up again, he supposes. Sometime.

Daud checks the windows next, living room first, then knocks on the half-open door to the other man's room.

“Coming in,” he says when there's no answer—the door wasn't closed, so it should be fine. There's no sign of the vagrant inside. Since he's not about to go searching in closets again—getting knocked flat on his ass once was enough—he makes a perfunctory test of the window and returns to his own room to grab a book off the shelf.

It's one he's already read, but he doesn't have any that he hasn't. Bringing the man back from the sewer had sidetracked him a little from his plans, mostly involving a detour to the university library with the kid's help; the only bookstore on their routes is lacking.

He'll have to go without new reading material for a while longer, apparently—he's not leaving his space unattended any longer than he has to. Foregoing his scouting trips to the barricades is going to be a pain, but better that than... whatever this newcomer is capable of coming up with in the meantime.

An hour later it's much easier to pick out the text, gray dawn giving way to pale streams of sunlight, and he's finished breaking fast. The living room window is cold at his shoulder, the floorboards only fractionally warmer under him. Every once in a while there are noises, coming from the end of the hall: the squeak of a closet door; the creak of bedsprings, just once; water splashing, followed by spitting. Daud takes a full minute to hope, desperately, that it's not the toilet water the man just tried drinking. (How long, in the storm drain? Maybe he's tried worse.)

His attention strays from the text, as always, to the street below the window. Walkers only rarely show up—the barricades keep most of them out—but he can't keep himself from checking, again and again, for shadows in the lee of the building. The others don't bother; not with the fortifications, not with how the too-thick concentration of the plagued in the city drives nearly everyone away.

Sometimes, he sees dogs wander through, or cats—once, a mother and two kittens. She'd jumped into the overturned trashcans while they played on the wet sidewalk. He'd wondered where they slept, and whether they'd come by again. He hasn't seen them, in any case.

His mind wanders.

The water in the shower basin tastes wrong—sharp, clinging. (Chemical.) Corvo spits in the toilet, grimacing and working his tongue, but the sharpness lingers.

There is the bathroom: a sink and shower, tiled and curtainless. (He misses curtains. It looks like there used to be one, going by the bar crossing the room near the ceiling, but it's gone now. He's been keeping low, half-crouched, but to step into the basin he has to stand. Through the missing door, there is a direct line of sight to the big entry room.

His heart is a triphammer, swollen and wrong in his throat. He steps out of the basin, out of the bathroom; ignores the weakness in his knees.)

Then there is the corridor (bare), the first room (a bed), and the second room (a bed, a shelf, a box with books lined inside). Closets in each, wide enough to lie down in, though Corvo's mostly certain Daud doesn't want him in the closet nearest where he sleeps. Last night had been a rude awakening—but this place belongs to him. Daud's place, Daud's rules.

It had given him time to quietly wander the rest of the place, though, so he also knows there is a kitchen (cupboards, chairs, table, food—no food now: the rest is stashed at the back of the closet in the first room. It was more than he could eat, and he doesn't know how long he's meant to make it last). The tap hadn't worked—none of them do—but they must be getting water from somewhere.

(_Maybe the basement,_ says his memory. He tries not to think of the basement. He hasn't looked once at the front door since he walked through it, and he tries not to think of that either.)

He stops in the corridor a moment and rests, keeping an ear out. The walk from the river took more out of him than he thought.

The floor keeps making sounds, even when he makes his steps as light as he can. It's not like brick, or cement; the boards shift under the balls of his feet. Still, when he gets to the end of the hall and moves cautiously into view, Daud is staring out the window, back straight, breathing shallow but steady. Corvo crosses the room.

He'll surely find something if he opens enough cupboards.

It's the sound of cabinet doors being opened and closed that draws him out of his head and into the gray-lit space of his flat. Ah: signs of life. Daud doesn't turn yet, doesn't look at the man rooting about in his kitchen—just says,

“Cupboard over the stove.”

Wary silence, and the final, familiar squeak of old hinges, followed by the light rustling of plastic packets being riffled through. Mostly chips, nuts, dry long-lasting things, though they're reaching the end of their best-by date now. Soon, he'll only have energy bars left.

Daud considers a moment. “Water's in the jerrycan—big plastic jug under the sink. Glasses in the cupboard over it.”

That gets the immediate rattle of a door swung open too fast, and water, glugging—

Daud frowns. What is he even pouring into? He chances a glance.

The man bypassed glasses and, having apparently found the salad bowls, has filled one of those instead; he's sitting in the corner where two rows of cupboards meet, bowl balanced on his knees, sipping from the rim. Seconds later, his eyes snap up and he freezes.

Daud shrugs, the simplest way he has of saying he doesn't care. The man hesitates, but before long he goes back to drinking.

Daud, still half-turned towards the window, watches him out of the corner of his eye.

“What do I even call you,” he mutters, mostly to himself.

The man takes one last slow sip and sets the salad bowl down, wiping his mouth with the back of his arm. The wet leaves a paler stripe through the dirt.

It takes Daud's eyes a moment to register that the man's hands are forming signs.

Well, one sign: thumbs curled together, fingers flat and pointed out. Like wings. Like a—

“What?”

He points at Daud, face set in a frown that's less anger than _pay attention,_ and makes the sign again. Is he trying to—?

“Bird?” Daud asks, brow furrowing, and the man shakes his head, dark eyes shifting, either nervous or looking for inspiration. He stops, focuses—pinches a lock of his own black hair between two fingers, and looks Daud in the eye. When Daud doesn't respond, he shakes it a little.

He can't even be sure it's the name question he's answering, but since he can't imagine a hairy bird, he's going to assume the man means the color.

“Blackbird?” Another shake of the head. “What—raven?” The expression on the man's face is tight-lipped and incomprehensible. Daud leans back, cross-armed and narrow-eyed, in case it's meant to be laughter and he should feel offended. “Crow?”

He drops the lock of hair and stares, intent. Daud frowns. “That can't be your real name.”

The man shrugs. Daud supposes that's fair.

Crow it is.

A knock at the door: Daud looks up from where he's delved back into his book. Crow has disappeared again, the flat silent.

“Door's open,” he calls, and the kid sticks his head through the gap. Daud's eyebrows tick. “Checking in?”

“Yes,” the boy says, like he's done this for all the new faces in their little fortified hold. (He hasn't. He leads them in by the hand and then drops them unceremoniously on everyone else's doorstep, acting like they've always been there. All except one—but here is another exception. Maybe the kid is changing his ways. Small miracles.) He glances around, clearly looking for him—for Crow—and edges inside when he doesn't see him. “How is he?”

“You can ask him yourself,” Daud says, propping the book back up to block the sight of the door.

There is a long moment of silence. In the stillness that follows, a light tapping starts up.

Daud peers suspiciously over the top of the book to make sure the kid isn't kicking the wall—but no, he's only rapping it with his knuckles, in a line from the door around the living room, and stops short when Crow's ragged head appears out of the hallway.

The kid stares at him a moment, then smiles. It might be one of the awkwardest facial expressions Daud has seen him wear.

“Settling in?” he asks, and Crow tilts his head fractionally, the kid nodding back like that means something. His hands fidget behind his back, and he lifts and drops his heels. Daud's never seen the kid nervous—or not so obviously, at least. He's torn between needing to observe, and offering the boy a little privacy.

The narrow-eyed glance the kid shoots him makes him want to roll his eyes, but he puts the book up again.

“Do you—Is there anything—” The boy stops again, and no sound follows: not of cloth as Crow moves, not steps, not anything. Daud can imagine it: the stare, boring into the kid's eyes. The kid staring back, just barely frowning, trying to figure him out.

He'd despair if it wasn't exactly what he might expect.

“You'll do fine,” is what the boy settles on, and Daud can feel the muscle in his jaw twinge to match his side.

The kid leaves, and Crow retreats, back into the (shallow) depths of the flat.

Dinner is quiet.

Since Crow hardly did anything beyond crossing the living room every once in a while, and Daud couldn't spend _that_ much time thinking of ways to strengthen the barricades or working out the next expansion of their territory (definitely the university sector, Bái's idea with the mall was reasonable enough but it was too risky to attempt until they took over the surrounding areas), he came down to help prepare. Delilah joined him partway in; usually that would make it an occasion, but the only change she'd brought was to roll out dough and fill a couple of pie tins with the fried vegetables.

_One terrible week,_ he thinks, watching the others out of the corner of his eye. They have to stay alert. Mistakes crop up when you're not alert.

Daud loads up a plate once he's finished, and Bái stops him as he's passing the door.

“Do you think he'll come down anytime this week?” she asks, eyes flicking up through the floors of the building.

Daud's mouth pulls, not quite a grimace, not quite a smile. “... I think he's acclimating.”

“It's just strange,” she says, a little pinched, “Having someone here most of us haven't seen.”

Daud chews on the _you could always come by_ that sits on his tongue and swallows it back. The kid might show up without concern for Daud's personal comfort, but he'd rather the rest of them didn't.

That night he wakes up to full and stifling darkness again, but can't figure out why. He lies in bed and listens. The flat is silent. Just to be sure, he gets up and pads to the closet, cautious, and rattles the door on its rails a little. Nothing.

Then he slides it open, standing well clear. Still nothing. A glance inside is enough to know it's empty.

He resigns himself to an hour or two of waiting, lies back in bed, and stares blankly at the ceiling.

Daud eats breakfast as the sun rises, pale light outlining long shadows thrown across the section of the park he can see from the window. The new plate is gone. The old plate still hasn't made an appearance.

He doesn't know where Crow is stashing them—a quick look through the kitchen cupboards yielded no results—but he hopes he won't have to turn the man's room upside-down to get them back downstairs and avoid an infestation of roaches.

(They could always _eat_ the roaches, he considers, picking at a pear from the park. _Good protein._ His mouth tries to smile.)

Sometimes, living here is like living alone. None of them make much noise, of course, but in Daud's case the apartment below his is empty most of the day, dead silent; and while Bái lives overhead, he's never heard a thing from upstairs. She either hardly moves or knows how to without making a sound. It'd be useful these days, as far as skills go, if she left the building at all.

(He dreamed of her once, silent and soft-edged, pale wings keeping her aloft, and couldn't sleep the rest of the night.)

Daud takes in the chill of the air. He has to strain to pick up anything: wind from outside; his own breathing; what might be a dog, barking high-pitched in the distance.

Of course it doesn't last.

Crow starts wandering maybe an hour into Daud's vigil, and though he's discreet about it he'd have to be a ghost for Daud not to pick up on his movements. He stalks his bedroom, circles it over and over, unless he branches into the corridor and spends long, silent spans of time in the toilet, door closed. Daud doesn't know what he can be doing in there. Maybe he likes sitting in the dark.

Once, Daud hears the distinct squeak of his own room's door hinges. He doesn't go to investigate.

(He can hardly see the words on the page. Sound holds all of his attention: feet on floorboards then carpet, shuffling, and the barely-there sounds of things being opened and closed and shifted and touched. He thinks he can hear fingers trailing down the spines of his books. Nothing from the closet.)

Only the bathroom goes untouched.

It _bothers_ him, and is all the more annoying for it; he'd rather not care. Let the guy stew in his own grime and sweat. (Then he remembers the room where Crow sleeps is a bare few feet away from his.)

By noon he gives in. He waits, patiently, for Crow to show his face in the kitchen—not even a sure thing, going by his feeding habits, so Daud had told himself if he didn't show that would be that, but here he is—and lobs a folded towel directly at him.

Crow jumps and bats it away like a startled cat. Daud wishes, somewhat uncomfortable, that he looked outraged rather than confused and a little afraid, but barrels through it.

“In case you didn't know where the towels were,” he says, flat, doing his best not to voice a disdain he doesn't feel. “You live here now. Respect the place and clean up.”

There's the anger: the stare not just focused but directed, scouring, Crow's mouth twisting at the corners. His eyes dart back to the corridor. Is he thinking of the bathroom? Or of escaping?

He lets the towel fall open, takes a corner—starts rubbing it against his face, his arms, scraping most of the dirt away, and the longer he holds the glare the shittier Daud feels, sitting there, watching him pull up his sleeves and the legs of his pants and attack as much of his own skin as he can reach without stripping naked. Daud finally looks away.

When Crow is done he throws the towel to the floor and disappears down the hall. A door is firmly shut.

“What's wrong with my bathroom?” Daud mutters as he picks up the towel, guilt pressing up in his ribs, pushing the words out. “It's a fine bathroom.”

(Another part of him thinks of Crow missing out on lunch and knots up tight. Maybe he has something squirrelled away in his closet, or whatever corner he's been hiding the plates in.)

He thinks on the problem a while longer. Crow hasn't stepped outside the flat yet, despite having explored and re-explored the parts he seems interested in. Getting used to a closed space again?

It's something he can't entirely figure out, but if going down and getting water from the basement himself is what Crow needs, it's not like Daud lacks the time to do it.

He makes the trip in fifteen minutes.

“I left you water in the bathroom if you need it,” he says through the closed bedroom door, and goes back to his book.

Around mid-afternoon he heads to his shelf for another, less-recently-read one. There's been no sign of Crow using the shower—if he doesn't by evening, Daud will take the water for his own—but he checks anyway, sees that nothing's moved, and goes back to his room with a sigh hissed between his teeth. He stops.

Crow is frozen in the corner by the closet, staring at him.

For a moment, Daud is locked in place—waiting? But Crow doesn't move, shoulders up a fraction higher than they should be, palms pressed to the wall like he's ready to bolt. On instinct, Daud raises a hand and looks away (_What's that supposed to mean? Be not afraid?_), going for the shelf. He can almost feel the stare burning into his back as he pulls a book from the selection, the slide of the paperback almost drowned out by that sensation of being _observed_.

He hardly pays Crow any attention as he leaves and thinks he sees, out of the corner of his eye, some of the stiffness drain from the man's posture.

Evening spreads slow, the light darkening outside. He chafes; he can't remember the last time he spent this long not _doing_ something. It's almost enough to make him want to take up painting—and always, on the edge of his focus, the constant, irregular sounds of Crow's meanderings picking up again.

Dinner, and a new plate of food, and after he's showered with the water Crow didn't use Daud drops into bed, the back of his head aching in that low, tooth-gritting tension way. He measures his breaths until his eyes decide to close. The dark takes him.

The dark spits him back out too few hours later, his heart's racing a heavy discomfort, startled and disoriented and already sitting up, eyes searching the room before the rest of him picks up on what jerked him from sleep.

Some dim sound. Coming from behind the door. None of his instincts, perhaps addled with sleep, read it as danger.

It takes him a moment, without that urgency driving his movements, to decide to go to the door and open it; by then the noise has stopped. Outside, the corridor is empty, the bathroom dark and soundless, Crow's door half-open.

Daud draws slowly back inside.

He doesn't check Crow's window in the morning, the closed door too clear a dismissal.

(He does spend five minutes crouching in front of it, hand pressed to the bottom to check for a leak of cold air. What if he left, somehow scaled the side of the building? The food in the kitchen is untouched.

_No,_ he tells himself, remembering Crow's sharp face and the split second glimpse of his ribs as he was scrubbing himself down yesterday, _ that's a stupid fucking theory, _ and stops thinking about it.)

A couple of hours after he's settled back into his new routine of not doing anything (he's starting to get sick of reading), Crow manifests. His first pass stops at the end of the corridor. The second reaches the kitchen, and Daud hears the scrape of the plate, then feet across the floorboards back to Crow's den. He's giving Daud a wide berth.

The worry he must reluctantly admit was there dissipates, and as the hours unwind and Crow grows bolder, his presence louder, it is quickly replaced by raw and twitching tension. Every time Crow crosses the living room Daud's focus breaks, and he forgets what he was thinking, what sentence he was on, the number of stretches he's done. His every movement feels weighted with a potential violence.

He needs air.

The roof is empty, leafy stalks swaying in a cold breeze. Soon, everything here will be empty, dug up and composted, and what can be grown through the winter will be housed inside. They'll have to manage their supplies a little more carefully; Delilah's been looking into conserving a part of the last harvest.

Speaking of, she must have come out earlier to water her plants. All the better for him. Daud settles down by the bean trellis with his book, huddled against the wind.

Twenty minutes later he's up and pacing, wandering from one corner of the roof to the next, poking at the plants for something to do. His heartbeat is trying to crawl up his own throat—not rapid, hardly even pounding, just forceful, _there,_ a sound and pressure he can't ignore. He leans his elbows on the edge of the roof and stares down at the street, unseeing, for as long as he can stand. It doesn't help.

Bitter, tight-shouldered, he goes back inside—but rather than return to the vagrant walking the flat around and around like an animal in a cage, he heads for the kitchen, and starts on the inventory of their stores.

The kid comes in as he's counting up cans, when his headache has dropped back down to manageable levels, and stands right next to Daud with his hands in his pockets, looking down. Daud thinks he's looking down. He hasn't checked; doesn't want to see whatever inkling of smugness or laughter he might find in the boy's face.

“Are you holding up?” he asks, and his voice is so completely devoid of amusement Daud stops to look at him. His face is the kind of controlled neutral Daud knows too well to be fooled by.

“A couple of hiccups,” he says, finishing with the stacks he's on. “It'll blow over.”

After a while, the kid starts in on another section of the inventory; busying his hands while he works out the next thing he wants to say. Daud almost wants to tell him to leave off, but he thinks he might need the help if he wants to finish before they start getting dinner ready.

“... And how is he doing?” the kid eventually mutters, low enough he might be hoping not to be heard.

Daud considers, for a long couple of minutes, the many ways he could answer. _As well as could be expected; you saw him, didn't you? _Or _why not check on him yourself? The door's unlocked during the day._ Or other, more delicately-handled things he's not sure are his place to say.

“Getting his bearings,” is what he decides on; a moment later he adds, growling, “Pissing me off.”

“Who doesn't?” the boy says, direct and uncaring, and Daud would throw the pen at him if he didn't need it to write. They finish in blessed quiet.

He wakes in the night, and this time he hears it clearly: that sound. He knows it. Half-formed sounds, mumbled, their strength wavering. Out in the corridor. Daud swings his legs from the bed.

In three strides, he's opened the door, but again the hallway is empty and quiet. Did he dream it? No—he's certain, he heard it. There's no sign Crow was there, though. Daud feels along the floor by the wall with one foot like he might find the warmer spot where Crow had been sitting.

He listens for a minute. Nothing. A suspicious amount of nothing, really. He's tempted to take on that unimpressed tone he used to do so well, and call out, _You have a bed, you know,_ to the not-empty flat. To Crow, wherever he's gone to hide now he's been discovered.

No. He is not this man's keeper.

Daud quietly closes the door.

The more noise Crow makes as he moves about the flat, the more Daud ghosts around his own place. There's something foreign here, his senses tell him—be careful. Even wearing double layers and boots against the cold, he can barely hear himself exist.

Crow's gone to Daud's room again: he can hear him flip through the books this time, soft pages under black-edged nails. He won't wash beyond scrubbing the topmost layers of dirt away—fine. He hasn't used the toothbrush Daud brought out of storage—but then he isn't speaking anywhere near Daud's face, so. Fine.

Still, there must be _something_ he can do.

Determined, Daud heads into his bedroom, saying, “Where have you been putting the plates—” and only realizes his mistake when the hardcover comes at his face.

He ducks—just in time, as the book crashes into the wall right by where his head had been—and jerks back and to the side at a second series of crashes, expecting more projectiles.

There are none. Information starts filtering in beyond rapid forward movement.

Crow: standing by the bookshelf, which is cracked and swinging from only one screw, apparently dislodged by the force of the attack. Half of Daud's collection is strewn across the floor. The tome at Daud's feet has a cracked spine, and there's a dent in the wall.

That'll teach him to enter a room unannounced, he supposes. His eyes flick back up.

Crow stands stock-still by the wall; wary but no longer panicked, assessing. They stare each other down across the room.

Daud's jaw aches. He digs a thumb into its hinge, can almost hear the creak from how hard he's gritting his teeth. He stoops to pick up the hardcover.

“... _Why,_” he grinds out, “Did it _have_ to be the _books._”

Crow's gaze focuses on the cracked book in his hands, flicks to the door and away again.

Daud almost feels calm as he walks out of the bedroom and down the hall; enough he fools himself into thinking he can deal with this, figure out the proper response. He remembers that Crow isn't a child, but a full-grown stranger sharing his space. Reason flounders.

The proper response, he decides as the rage hits, is this:

_Grab your pack from the kitchen corner. Prepare: bedroll, flashlight, canteen, binoculars, food. Check to make sure the knife is on your belt. Ball up all of your bilious fury._

(It screams in his grip. It wants his hands and the hilt of his blade. Refuse it: it must be channeled, and its only exit point is useful work.)

_Go to the bedroom. Tell him:_

“Get the plates back downstairs.”

_Tell him:_

“I'll be gone a couple of days.”

_Leave._


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _It twitches and starts to turn. Eyes—bloodshot and egg-wet—zero in on him. Something in it rattles—_

The first breath tastes mostly of relief.

Daud takes in the grit under his boots, the stark and empty smell of the city; when he'd arrived the streets around the building had still smelled of something gone wrong—rot, sickness, old blood on hot days—but the cold weather and the months passing have taken care of that.

He sets out at a light pace, digging into the pockets of the coat he'd thrown on for the last of the nuts and dried fruit. The supply run they were supposed to make in a couple of days is getting done early and solo; the note he left on the kitchen table explains as much.

The blockades are holding up fine: from a distance, he can see the heavier foundations are still in place, the barbed wire stretched taut across the front. No bodies caught on it, or at least none visible from where he is. Overhead, the sun is starting to make its way back down to the horizon, the city's shadows stretching.

He took a late start. It'll be fine. He only has to be careful with the flashlight, and find himself a good bolthole before full dark.

The North passage is best for where he wants to go, so that's the direction he takes. All of their exits are set up the same way: first floor boarded and blocked city-side, only the back door on their side left open; he gets to the second floor and the rope ladder is there, ready to unroll down the other side of the building. No walkers in sight. As soon as his feet touch pavement, he throws the weighted end of the ladder back through the window.

Even before the outbreak, before what must be the whole of the Isles went to shit, Daud had known this city down to its filthy, guttering soul. The sick and the dying are no more than another layer of tarnish. It's not on one of their standard routes, the place he's going—but he knows exactly how to get there, and it's only half an hour out in a zone that's been nearly clear for a month.

He has an errand to run.

The front door shuts, and Corvo's body unlocks. He picks up the books that have fallen to stack them on the bedside table. The one Daud took—the one Corvo threw—is lying on the kitchen table.

Its cover feels strangely soft in his hands, wrinkled where the spine cracked. It goes with the others.

The shelf hangs, awkward; he touches the crack where the screw tore through cheap wood and, thinking, goes looking for tape in every cupboard, closet and drawer he can find.

Without Daud in it, the flat is almost as empty as the underground waterways Corvo had hunted in—a little more, sometimes, when the lack of echo grows oppressive, too little stagnant noise. It makes everything else louder. Doors shriek when they open; cupboards pop and clatter shut; the carpet shuffs under his feet, and the floorboards creak and settle, and beyond that, nearly beyond hearing, there is the sound of the person who lives upstairs.

Memory drops names into his hands—just as quickly, they slip from his grasp.

When he lies down in the dark, the noise reminds him of the rats. That is an almost, too: almost a comfort. Almost company. He thinks of them, bright-eyed, squirming; how they might dig into these walls, droves of warm bodies. Ravenous.

His stomach hurts. It would be a weight, if a weight could swell, could rise into his lungs. He finishes the slice of vegetable pie (it was so good—too soft now, soggy, the juices soaked into the crust—but so good) and stacks this second empty plate on top of the other one, right by the front door. He knows that's not enough, that he's supposed to bring them out, to cross the door—sweat breaks out between his shoulders, and he backs up again.

Without Daud, there are a few more square meters to inspect on every round, too. Corvo touches the new corners where lintel meets floor, and follows the angle in the wallpaper up to the ceiling, which he can't quite reach. It folds up around the edges of the window. Outside, there is sky, and stars hung inside it. His hands leave marks on the cold glass of the window pane.

He's seen this view every night since he arrived and still wants to breathe it in.

Sleep takes him in snatches: leaning against the wall by the window, sprawled on the carpet of the room that's meant to be his, and sometimes, if he's lucky, huddled in the blankets he's packed inside the closet as he's waiting for sleep.

The sun sets. The sun has set. The flat is dark and silent, the last trailing sounds of people gathered on the floor below rising, passing the front door and fading. Corvo stands in the lightless entrance to the bathroom, then steps inside. He makes himself stay, eyes flickering uncontrollably for something to see, until his back itches and he buries himself in the dark of the closet instead.

Daud has been watching the street, the one just beyond the nearby barrier, from his vantage point in this cleared apartment; he's waiting for the sun to rise high enough that things hiding in the shadows won't be a problem.

The convenience store he hit up on the way here last night was almost empty. He only took enough for a day's worth of meals—no sense weighing himself down if he's coming back this way—but when he raids it for supplies to bring back, the only things left will be cat food and toothpaste. From what he remembers, it's getting to be lean pickings in the rest of their usual spots, too. That's going to be a problem with winter coming in fast.

They need to clear new streets. What they have left in the safe zone should get them through, maybe even a month into spring, but better to prepare than wait until disaster hits.

In the street, two walkers sift through gutter garbage, and another is walking down the road in the wrong direction, meaning the one Daud wants to take. _Should be fine,_ he thinks, pulse picking up a little. As long as he keeps quiet, he can skirt around the other two without them noticing and take out the last one, drag it into an alley further up—he can see a promising indent through the binoculars. This is fewer walkers than he's seen yet in this area; worse comes to worst, three against one isn't terrible odds. Cold energy shoots through his arms and legs. Part of him wants to laugh, hopped up on anticipation.

The barriers were built sturdy and stable, but Daud is still careful when he climbs over this one to the street—however slow they might look, shambling four or five yards away, any noise that isn't background attracts them like rot does a fly. Asphalt grits cold under his boots. The walker idling in the middle of the road doesn't turn back.

He takes his time, softening his steps so his pack makes the bare minimum of noise. Everything metallic but the canteen and the knife at his belt he left behind: he'll have to make do without the flashlight, either hole up at his destination or find another place he can block off if he can't make it back before it gets dark. The days are shorter now.

There is a lull in the noise from the two in the gutter. His gut clenches, nape prickling. The noise picks up again.

It's not that he enjoys it, he thinks, stabbing the knife into the base of the walker's skull and heaving it onto his shoulder. He'd just rather take the straightest, quickest path to where he's going, than go out of his way to avoid confrontation. A glance ensures there's nothing moving in the alley; he dumps the body and keeps moving.

It's a reminder, too, he tells himself as he makes his way, pausing at corners—everything is clear, he's a lucky bastard this time—a reminder of what it was not to have any of this: a secure base, a steady source of food, people to work with. Luxuries. He knows survival, and doesn't much want to go back to it.

There it is: the library, just ahead. He can see the steps, rising from the sidewalk to an imposing façade.

It might also be, just a little bit, that he hasn't moved in far too long—proper moving, hyperawareness picking up on every sound, ready to bolt or attack; high on the immediacy of his senses.

(Might be other things. He left yesterday at noon, and he won't be back until tomorrow morning at the earliest. The back of his mind tries to quantify what food he'd seen in the cupboards as he packed until he feels his focus wavering and comes back to the road, the street he's in, the library.)

Used to be the blocks of buildings here were gardens. That changed about the same time the old university turned into a public library. The upper floors were still closed off last he visited, used as government offices—he'll be able to break in now, but he's not sure it's going to offer much of use.

One of the double doors at the front is open. Daud comes to a slow halt. He'd have found a back way in if they were closed, but an open door spells danger. Still—he listens, quiet, eyes darting to scan each end of the street—the doors are an easy way in; there's no guarantee he'll find another that's as practical, or as quiet. Breaking a window might not be a good idea.

In any case, even with the road empty now, he can't be certain it's going to stay that way. He needs to get out of this street.

Up the stairs, check inside—the dark space looks and sounds unoccupied. He crosses the threshold and ducks in, quick, behind the closed door, hairs on his neck prickling.

It's strange; even empty, cavernous places like this always _feel_ like there's something waiting around a corner, an echo chamber desperate to reflect.

A quick canvas of the ground floor aisles gets him two walkers wandering around, several shelves between them. Have to take them out before he closes the front doors back up. He's not sure if the reverb will help or hinder: keep them confused as to the source of whatever noise he makes when he takes them down, or amplify it and bring the stray one right to him.

Nothing he can do about it anyway.

First the one furthest away from the grand staircase leading to the second floor; if there are more up there, he'll need some time to dive for cover when they come running. His back to a shelf, sliding along it, he follows the bubbling sound of its breathing—comes up behind it—winds back his arm—

It twitches and starts to turn. Eyes—bloodshot and egg-wet—zero in on him. Something in it _rattles—_

He's got a grip on its hair and it makes a grab for his arm, but before it can get him off-balance he stabs the knife in behind the ear, through cartilage right into the brain, and as it slumps out of his hold he dodges back out of sight just in time to avoid being seen by the other one, stumbling out from the shelves for the unfamiliar sound.  
That one he trips and bowls backwards, driving his blade into its eye. It goes down with hardly more than the thump of its skull on the tiles.

Daud presses back against the nearest shelves, breath barely controlled, eyeing the balconies on the upper floor. It's too open. Should have thought of that before—if there are more of them up there, they'll find him at the first glance. He needs to close the doors and regroup.

Imposing as it is, the door takes a hefty push to start moving, groaning all the way; after that it glides shut almost on its own. He doesn't let the relief get the better of him at the solid sound it makes—retreats, still carefully watching the second floor, until he's mostly out of sight and hefts himself to the top of a bookcase for a bird's eye view.

(It flashes through him: Crow, head cocked, perching much the same—maybe a little more graceful, or a little more _feral,_ like a great featherless bird. The corner of his mouth twitches.

He shakes his head and gets a hold of himself.)

He lets fifteen minutes pass. No watch this time, so he tries to count out the seconds under his breath, and stops once it feels likes it's been long enough. There's been no sound, no movement. His pulse has calmed. If the place had been closed when this whole mess started, that might explain there being no one, not even walkers here beyond a couple of stragglers—but why the open door?

He jumps down anyway. He has business to get to.

The double staircase is clear, and the second floor looks just as clean: no bodies, no walkers, no old bloodstains on the ground. There can't have been anyone here when things really went to shit. Someone must have come in later—someone with the key. (Who were they? How did they navigate the city?)

Things feels safe enough for the moment, so he shelves that thought and gets to looking. He's been here a few times, before the plague; knows the floorplan not quite by heart. It doesn't take him long to find what he's looking for.

Personal interest is what he's here for first and foremost. The Serkonan and Tyvian fiction sections yield a plentiful bounty that he squeezes into the bottom of his pack and every side pocket available. (Not much light filters through the high windows; he almost wishes for his flashlight as he squints to distinguish titles in the gloom.)

The medical section takes more time. He searches—straightening every few minutes, at first, to check for more walkers coming out of the woodwork, then forgetting caution in favor of skimming for the information he wants—and peruses for who knows how much time, staring into books on anatomy—respiratory, gastrointestinal, musculoskeletal—the studies of diseases—treatises on surgery—

He has to fight down the impulse to take half the array with him. (It's a considerable amount. You can tell, even without knowing its history, that the place was the heart of the sciences in the past.) _The internet would be damn useful right now,_ he thinks, but the books are getting heavy. If he considers the added weight of supplies, it's not going to be an easy walk back.

As he heads down the stairs—the light through the thin windows means he still has some time, but he needs make himself an exit soon, one less noticeable than the huge and groaning front doors—one section on the ground floor catches his eye. He's there, flicking a look over the spines, before he quite knows why. His hand stops in the process of drawing a thick volume out.

The spine is solid, but on the inside the pages are held together by a spiral. He flips through. Photos: a woman, other times a man, signing with their arms and hands. It takes him a second of staring down blankly before his own reasoning hits him, and he bites back an exasperated grunt. He came out here, admittedly, to _get away_ from Crow, not have the memory of him digging that sharp stare into his shoulder blades.

Better to try written communication first, since at least there's a good chance the other man is literate. He puts it back.

(The idea refuses to stop nipping at his heels, infuriating, until he leaves.)

The only doors on the ground floor are locked, or lead into dead end offices and storage spaces. He trudges back up to the second floor, hoping for a fire escape, but with a building as old as this one, and knowing the local government before everything blew up in their faces, he's aware it's unlikely.

(His pack pulls on the tendons of his neck and shoulders. Wanting things and providing them for himself is just, he reasons, redistributing the weight he's carrying. Impulsive selflessness doesn't become him.

The meek tatters of his conscience remind him of Crow's face when Daud had asked for his belt back, and the way he'd clutched the raincoat around him, his own clothes worn through. He grits his teeth, distracted.

Crow had only showed a passing interest in the books on Daud's shelves—beyond using them as _weapons,_ he points out, resentful—but he'd still been wearing the raincoat when Daud left, the thing wrinkled and stained just from being on him. He could do with a change of clothes, maybe.  
Daud could, too. His things are getting worn, and he's not sure when was the last time he got himself a new pair of pants. It's not the worst idea.)

He's right about the fire escape: there's nothing but more windows, and the double doors leading upstairs to the government offices, far over on the opposite end from the history section. The last bookcase got toppled in front of them at some point, blocking the way. He crouches on top of it, trying to figure out whether he can shift the thing, and a noise stops him in his tracks.

Low moaning, discordant. More than one source. It rises and lowers, a disconcerting wave, muffled by the double doors.

The library might have been closed, but the people who worked in those offices must have decided to wait it out in there. They must have hoped someone would come for them. That they could be saved. They didn't know the sickness gets in everywhere.

In any case, Daud's not going that way. One exit left: through a window, and into the street.

There were cables in the ground floor offices, hook-ups for the machines and computers; Daud gathers everything he can, even what wiring he can rip from the walls, and ties it haphazardly into a rope. On the second floor, he opens one of the windows and looks down. Street seems clear.

He drags the nearest table over, ties the cables as securely as he can to one of the legs, and throws the lot out. Waits, impatient, to make sure nothing's coming to investigate. Starts making his way down.

By the time he's back on his feet and heading for where he'd made camp the night before, the sky is rapidly veering to darkness. Barely enough time, he thinks—but he'll make it.

In the light of day the flat is colored pale and drowned, submerged in gray. Corvo slides his palms along the bare walls from the front door to the living room window, once passing the kitchen, once the corridor. The dark pit of the bathroom draws his eye.

When he stands long enough on the floorboards, the wood warms under his feet—he pads down the hall—but here in the bathroom—the tiles—they're cold and slick. Light glints off corners like moving metal. The air—it tastes damp, chilled. Leaves a sensation like sick in the back of his throat. He looks away and backs out, slowly.

His back itches. He needs—something in his hands, fingers clenching. Finds himself standing in front of the shelf again. It's still crooked, just barely holding on to the wall. There was no tape anywhere; even if there had been, he isn't sure it would have helped. His eyes flick to the side that's still hanging on, note the flathead screw, and he considers the tools he might have on hand to bore a hole; he has to guess at the shelf's dimensions.

The first day he spent here is a little unclear in his memory, sometimes feeling endless and ongoing, maybe not over yet, blurring into now—and sometimes, like nothing more than a pivot between _out there_ and _in here_. He does remember, though, everything Daud had carried out of the flat and across the landing.

It's only a few steps away. He could bring out the plates. He could bring back what he needs.

There won't be anything behind the door. He can't see, but he can hear; there won't be anything.

The sun sets for the second time, and Corvo watches it go down, tracking its slow, inching progress beyond the city skyline. After it has gone from sight—after the ground has turned to something vague and blue-black, indistinguishable—he can still catch glimpses of red and orange blooming in highrise windows if he shifts just right.

His clothes are still damp with sweat, and his palms ache, but the window is cool against his forehead.

Color drains from the city as the night moves in. When he starts to shiver, Corvo lies down in the closet to wait.

It's not fear, what Corvo feels just above the hollow of his hunger, but that's his only point of reference for how it crawls up his throat and strangles, or eels down into his legs and nails his feet to the floor. He has to wait, to make sure there's nothing in the places just beyond his sight, make sure his heartbeat is the only sound he can make out inside.

It's nothing specific. He's on edge, is all. Things haven't been so quiet for so long in a while.

(It's very specific. He stands in the middle of Daud's room, eyes skimming over the closet, the dent in the wall by the door—)

Dawn is only just breaking, washed-out and white through the flat, and he hasn't slept.

(—the bed. The covers are a mess. The pillow's been shoved off to the floor. He twitches with the impulse to put it back. His head is quiet, flat, like water left alone.)

(_A couple of days._ It's a rough voice. He thinks it was meant to be cold, and holds it close.)

(One floor below him and a number of steps away is another place, and inside it are unknown faces but also one half-familiar stranger, whose hands gave him a pear and then gave him away. He must be something heavy to carry.)

(_A couple of days._

Behind the door, the landing is silent.)

There's a thrift store along the route back, tucked in next to one of the barricades. Daud had known it was there, in an off-handed way—he'd just never thought much of it until he looked at it, the sign highlighted by the morning sun, and yesterday's thought tipped over into decision. Now his bag is packed, what space he hadn't occupied with cans and non-perishables optimized to fit as many articles of clothing as he could fit in. (And a belt.)

The pack is heavy, as he'd expected; he's going to have a hard time controlling his descent on the zip-line. He gets the straps of the bag around the pulley's handles, pulls on the leather gloves he'd found in the shop and takes hold of the wire rope, lets himself go down the line hand over hand.

Delilah's out on the roof when he lands, and though she's clearly smirking as he tries to untangle himself from the pulley he doesn't do more than throw her a bent-mouthed glare.

“Do you need any help?” she asks once he's got himself straightened out.

“Only to understand what your problem is,” he snarks back.

Delilah stops just short of laughing, elbow leaning on a planter box and trowel brandished like a baton. “Well aren't you chipper.”

“It's the morning air.”

Down on the fifth floor, the lock clicks open and the door inches ajar a moment before swinging open, Bái coming out on the landing.

“You're back,” she says, and she might not be smiling but the way the words drop sounds pleased, or relieved. Daud drops the pack and flips it open, draws something out from the top.  
“Here,” he says, handing it over. “It'll get colder. This should help.”

It's a jacket, thick wool in dark colors – she didn't have much with her when she came here, from what he knows, and though that wasn't a problem through the spring and summer, autumn will be ending soon. He's never seen her wear anything warmer than a light sweater, even on chill rainy days.

Bái holds it up, taking it in with a glance, and looks back up at him. Nods.

“Thank you.”

The kid shows up while Daud is unpacking the food, storing it in the cupboards of the communal kitchen, and comes to stick his nose in everything like something curious and annoying. A cat. Perhaps a parakeet.

Daud huffs under his breath and tries to finish up around him. The missing plates are back, going by the height of the stack behind the glass cupboard. He has to remember to mark down that convenience store as empty on their supply map.

“Lady Moray still busy?” Daud asks, rooting through the last of the provisions. Some of it he'll keep, to replace whatever Crow ate while he was gone, and the rest will stay here for the others to pick from, or for future excursions. “How's Crow?”

“Crow?” The kid frowns but doesn't stop looking.

“Your new friend,” Daud says, a little sharp, and the kid turns to him with an expression like surprise on his face.

“He told you his name?”

“Hand signs,” Daud explains. “Not his real name.”

“Maybe he doesn't have a real name,” the kid retorts, level, and Daud's mouth twists a little. He'd rather not get caught up in a philosophical discussion over _names,_ of all things, so he keeps rummaging through the bag, sorting and setting aside, while the kid leans aimlessly on the table.

When Daud next glances at him, he's frowning down at his hand spread flat on the tabletop.

“... He still hasn't left your place,” the kid finally says.

That gives him pause. “Anybody bring him food while I was gone?”

“Mrs Bái brought him dinner like you do, but he didn't touch it.” His arms are crossed, the frown redirected at the opposite wall. “He brought the old plates out though.”

“It's something.” Daud sighs. “Right. I'll go check on him.” He hefts the bag back up onto his shoulder, and pauses. “Unless you'd rather check on him yourself.”

The kid stares at him. “I—yes—thanks,” he manages.

_This is torture,_ Daud thinks to himself, immediately remembering why this is a bad idea.

“Just to be clear,” he says, “I'm not sure having a crush on a man at least two decades your senior is a good idea.”

For a minute, the boy says nothing, face as blank as a turned-off monitor. Just as Daud, distinctly uncomfortable, is going to move on ahead and break the silence by leaving it behind, the boy says,

“Excuse me?”

“Nothing,” Daud says, determined to forget this ever happened, but the boy doesn't move to clear the narrow path between table and counter.

“I _do not,_” he says, forceful, “Have a _crush._”

“Yes, fine,” Daud answers, looking to the door like he might teleport there by sheer will.

“_Daud!_”

Something in the other flat crashes to the ground loud enough it's like the noise echoes under his feet. The kid's mouth is downturned and angry, his eyes almost wet, hands clenched into fists at his sides. This isn't exactly what Daud was expecting.

“I care about people,” the boy says, each word carefully enunciated as though measured and weighed.

Daud falters. “I know, kid.”

“You don't.” It's harsh, almost spat out between them. “You think I see everyone as mannequins in a window until I want something from them.”

Daud doesn't know what to say; and when he says nothing, does nothing but look at him, jaw hanging loose, hands empty and useless, the kid turns on his heel, walks to the other flat and slams the door.

Upstairs, his place is quiet and still. Daud sets down his bag and the low bookcase he took from the flat opposite to replace the shelf, and takes what's left of the food to the kitchen. His stores hardly look like they've been touched. Daud frowns.

The rest—the clothes, the books, the bookcase—he carries into his room, and has to stop in the doorway to take in the shelf on the wall.

It's whole again: upright, looking solid, the books he'd left lying all over the floor lined back up along it. Daud drops what he's carrying on the bed as he approaches. Touches the wood. It isn't the same, a different color and grain, but it's—repaired.

He looks around the empty room. A light tap on the closet door doesn't bring answering movement. The door to Crow's room has been left open, but he supposes that doesn't mean much. He huffs through his nose and sets the bookcase in the corner.

Daud shakes the covers a little straighter on the bed to lay the clothes out there, then crouches down to organize his newest selection, which is when he sees it.

There's an elbow, not quite poking out from under the bed. Daud takes a moment to look at it—to understand—and gets on hands and knees to look.  
Crow, sprawled flat on the floor, stares back over the bulk of his arm. There's barely a glint where the light from the corridor reflects in his eyes. He doesn't budge.

“Okay,” Daud says, and gets back up to finish what he'd started.

He isn't tired, and he's had time to get over the incident that had him grappling for escape, so he has no excuses for why he's now thinking about what might be a wrong step and how he might avoid one. The thought is here; the thought has been here, he thinks, for a while. Time to get to grips with it and make this flatshare work.

With his back turned he says, “There are clothes for you on the bed, those with the belt. I— thought you might need one.”

There follows a long shuffling sound as Crow crawls out from under the bed, and another, longer moment, either as he escapes or inspects what's on offer. When Daud considers he's given the man enough time, he turns.

Crow is leaning over the bed—and though the clothes Daud got for him are still folded, only a little untucked where Crow must have gotten a closer look, the belt is unrolled in his hands, his thumbs running over the leather. There are raised marks all around his fingers; on his palms, too, crossing the lines. Scars.

He's still staring at Daud, his shoulders hunched but steady. Daud returns the stare and takes a good look at him.

He's still filthy—that goes without saying—and his shirt is in tatters, his pants torn at thigh and calf and worn in the knees, coming apart around his heels. The raincoat must be the only reason he hasn't frozen in place yet. No shoes. Daud forgot about shoes.

(_It's a problem for later,_ he tells himself. There weren't going to be any excursions for a while yet.)

Scruffy about the face. Hair a mess, lank and scraggly, only held back by layers of dirt. The bags under his eyes are the color of bruises.

Crow tilts his head, eyes narrowing. Daud squares his chin and folds his arms, but holds the staredown.

“You hungry?” he asks. Crow's eyes flick away, toward the back wall—his room? the living room?—and return. He nods, and Daud motions for him to follow.

He pours an entire bag of chips from the reserves cupboard into a bowl and shoves it into Crow's arms.

“Eat that,” he orders, and brings out the jerrycan to pour the dregs into a series of glasses, which he lines up on Crow's side of the table. (He smells one, to be sure—doesn't smell of anything but the inside of a plastic bin—and sets it back down.) While Crow is busy picking out Cheetos with the tips of his fingers and licking them clean, Daud grabs a handful of energy bars and drops them into the pockets of his tattered raincoat.

Crow freezes at the touch, watching him, trying to wipe the thick orange dust from his face with the back of his hand. Daud waves for him to continue.

“Keep going,” he says, picking up a glass to sip from. “Finish it. And drink, it's salty stuff.” Crow digs in again, one eye still on him, crunching through chips two or three at a time. “The food in there isn't for emergencies—when you're hungry, take what you want. I can always get more.

“And stick around.” He puts the glass down, picks up the jerrycan. “We have things to talk about when I'm done.”

He refills their water reserve first, lugs it back up the stairs, and once it's back under the sink he busies himself putting away the new clothes—Crow's on his bed in the other room, his own on the hangers in the closet—and the rest of the equipment he'd taken with him.

When he goes back out to the kitchen Crow has moved, pressed as close as he can to the living room window, chip bowl hugged to his chest. Daud can still see him looking back, out of the corner of his eye. Tries not to let that fixed stare get his hackles up—and realizes, in the next second, that he doesn't need to.

Maybe he was right, when he told Delilah it was the morning air. Despite that rough moment with the kid, he doesn't remember feeling quite this mellow in a while. Almost unshakeable.

He sits slowly down in one of the kitchen chairs and takes another glass of water. Stretches his legs out.

There is a long moment, after Crow stops eyeing him in periphery, where time doesn't quite slow—but doesn't move forward, either. The water is cool and clear in his mouth, his body lax as he lets his focus blur. Daud watches the warm afternoon light spreading like molasses along the floorboards, Crow's silhouette a dark cut-out in contrast.

He thinks, gaze half-lidded, of how honey crystallizes, incremental.

(He thinks, too, of those early hours where he sits at the window and loses himself in the street—but this is another kind of lost. A lost where he can breathe, rather than always watch his back.)

Crow shakes himself back to waking. Outside, the sky is growing dark, and Daud still has something they need to discuss.

He draws a pencil and a piece of paper ripped from the thrift shop's note pad out of his pocket.

“Crow.” The man turns, eyes flicking down to his outstretched hand. “I think it's time we start talking.”

No answer, at first, but the intensity of those black eyes on the paper; then the stare rises, and Crow's hands with it, fingers flexing like he's making a point.

“That's not the easiest way of getting a point across,” Daud points out. He's still holding the note paper out. Crow drops his hands to his pockets.

The sigh that blows out of him is only a fraction of his irritation. He lifts his gaze to the ceiling like he might find a god there to distract him.

“Do you not know how to write?” he asks, elbow to the table and forehead in his palm.

Crow cocks his head to the side, face obstinately—maybe even defiantly—neutral.

Daud shoves the paper back in his pocket.

Downstairs, in the communal kitchen, the kid is combining cans into something approximating a meal.

“Need any help?” Daud asks, and the kid glances over and shrugs, so he gives the spread a glance, drags the vegetable crate over and starts chopping what looks like it might mix in well. The kid is sour—it's happened before, and it's not surprising now—but the way they hand things back and forth across the table is practiced, and easy, and Daud knows to recognize an unspoken truce_._

Lady Moray does not join them for dinner, but Delilah monopolizes the conversation well enough, explaining in vague detail her ideas for winter hydroponics. When Daud goes back to the flat with a full plate, he finds Crow curled like a parenthesis in front of the living room window, exactly where the sun slips in and warms the floor. He hesitates—should he leave the plate next to him?—but decides on the kitchen table, in case Crow rolls over in his sleep.

_Full night's sleep,_ Daud thinks upon waking, and chalks it up to his jaunt around the city. Crow has moved in the night: still lying on the living room floor, but on his belly now, head pillowed on his arms. The plate is half-finished, which Daud knows because it's still on the table. He'll call it progress.

The pears in the fruit bowl are going soft, so he peels them, flicks out the brown spots with the tip of his knife, and dices them onto a plate. Water, cereal bar. He leaves it all on the table, fetches one of the new books from the shelf, and comes back to stand in the middle of the living room and contemplate Crow, still asleep, half-sprawled in Daud's usual morning spot.

Daud has _habits._ Flatshare or not, he's not willing to break them, and damn him if he's going to let Crow be the most stubborn of the both of them. He sits in the narrow space between Crow's leg and the window.

Crow's eyes sliver open, obvious in the way the whole of his back and shoulders tense under the coat. A moment passes, Daud flipping pages with his thumb, focused on not getting pear juice on the pages. Gradually, Crow relaxes.

When the knock comes at the door, it's a disorienting effort to pull himself from the book. Getting up wakes a vicious twinge in every one of his joints—he's been sitting there much longer than he'd meant to, which the cool light cutting across the floorboards can attest to. It's almost noon. He should have been getting started on planning—

The knock comes again, exacting and insistent in its precision. Crow has risen to a crouch, balanced on fingertips and the balls of his feet, looking exactly like a wary cat as he eyes the door with either cautious curiosity or definite trepidation. Daud goes to answer; turns back, holding the handle. Crow is already at the corridor.

“You could come say hello,” Daud says, grimacing tactfully. Corvo does as is his wont and stares, unerring, long enough to make his point; then walks, calm and steady, into his room, and closes the door. It gives a firm click.

Daud wonders what the hell he did wrong this time, but decides to open the door rather than think it over.

It's Bái. He stares a little himself. It's unexpected—he hasn't seen her move around the building outside of evenings for a while—and she looks strangely delicate in the wool jacket he'd given her, white blouse too pale in contrast.

“Here,” she says, not even sneaking a glance through the open door, handing him the mostly-filled inventory he'd made of the kitchen. “I thought I could be of help planning the next month's supply runs.”

Right—the work he should have started this morning. Good thing what he got done a few days ago will save him time.

“You want me to show you how this works?”

“I have an idea,” she answers, and Daud lets a half-smile sneak in. “I only need the details.”

It's simple: list everything they have to restock or add to their stores. The inventories help, as long as they have an idea of how much they get through in a month—in his time here, he's gotten a pretty good sense of what they need, but with Crow around the numbers are going to be off. Better to plan for extra.

They finish up the inventories first, in part for Bái to practice: she knows where everything is, gets started on what they have stocked in the basement while he goes through the last of the kitchen cupboards, and they meet up on the second floor landing when they're done.

She hands him her work; his check is only cursory. He nods, and she etches a smile.

“You've seen the next part,” he says.

“We each give you a list of what we think we might need.”

“Don't expect many lists.” Her eyebrow raises a fraction. “You know how to prepare,” he explains. “They don't. Just keep some paper and a pencil on you.”

“Well.” She brings out her list, ready as always. “Here is what I took note of.”

While she knocks at the door, Daud fills in what necessities he's noticed were lacking—toothpaste, soap, all the little things people tended to forget. It's the kid who answers. He looks surprised to see Bái there, glancing between them, but when Daud shows him the inventories he nods.

They don't need much: thread, tea since the stuff in storage is getting old. Lighters and tobacco, though it's doubtful they'll find any. When the boy mentions driftwood from the Wrenhaven, Bái gives him a look: a little sad, a little knowing.

Before he can close the door a hand, narrow and wizened, curls over the kid's shoulder.

“My sweet boy,” says the Lady Moray, voice soft as old paper, “I've an errand for you.”

She turns to them, in the door. Her lips are pinched, but her smile stretches to her eyes.

“Aah, there you are, dearies.” She reaches; her hand touches the back of Bái's, cloudy eyes looking off to the void. “Good work, good work.” She pulls back; the door closes.

They share a look, and head upstairs.

Delilah answers her door leaning against the jamb, the paintbrush she's tucked behind her ear leaving traces of blue-black in her hair.

“Make it quick, I'm busy.” Her foot taps the landing like she's counting seconds.

She rattles off what she's running low on—paint, mostly, paper too, nails and plywood, adds that she'll be making a separate run for what she thinks she'll need for the hydroponics—and as the door closes on her turning back Daud looks to Bái and says,

“That's that finished. Next is actually planning the run.” He motions for the stairs. “Still interested?”

“Of course,” she answers, and follows him.

They pass the broken fifth floor door—

(_Should repair that. Take the door off at least, put up a curtain or something, and a carpet on that bloodstain—it must be like walking into an active crime scene every time she walks out of her apartment—)_

and Bái asks, too quiet,

“Do you miss him?”

He's looking through the lists again, going down his and Bái's. His hand hesitates, then finishes putting down _plates_—jots in _clothes_, too. They were all looking worn down.

“I didn't get to know him that well.”

“No less than the rest of us,” she says, and now her voice is tired, thick in her throat.

Daud tries to think of anything else, but the list looks complete now. “You and the kid—”

“I know what you meant, Daud.” She sighs, an edge of irritation ushering energy into her, straightening her back. “You are still calling him 'the kid'—he is a young man, you could at least be accurate—”

“I'll call him otherwise when he starts acting like it,” Daud grumbles, the pencil flicking side to side until he shoves it into his pocket.

“You could also call him by his name,” Hudié retorts, only half in exasperation. It's a well-worn argument.

He grunts. “Ah, yes. Remind me what the most recent one is.”

“Wasn't it Evan?” There: amusement, and a certain muted fondness. “I have no idea how he keeps track.”

“Might be easier if he wore a nametag,” Daud says, smirking.

She huffs, lips pinched and eyes narrow, but the dimple that used to crease her cheek when she smiled is there.

“Usually I start with Copperspoon so I don't have to keep walking up and down the stairs,” he says as he brings out their map of the city and lays it out on the kitchen table, glasses at each corner to keep it flat. Bái comes around to his side; the pencil is out again, crossing out the convenience store he had emptied the day before.

They put their heads together working out exactly what they'll need; then, the most efficient route through the cleared areas, how many trips will be necessary how many people— They get sidetracked arguing over what zone to secure next, and gradually, over half an hour, make their way back to the order of business, Daud noting down the directions they'll be putting up on the kitchen cupboards.

“So,” Bái says, bringing out the pins, “When will we be meeting this Crow of yours?”

“He's the kid's stray,” Daud retorts on automatic, and starts pinning plans to the wood. Bái murmurs something that sounds distinctly like _aren't we all._ He looks over his shoulder, shrugs. “Can't be sure. He didn't look too enthusiastic about my suggesting it this morning.”

“You haven't killed him and hidden him in a closet, have you?”

“Haha,” he mutters, sardonic. “Not my fault he acts feral.”

“Maybe he needs to feel welcomed,” she says.

Daud hears himself make some kind of answer—

But the back of his head has already uncoupled from the conversation and latched on to the bare bones of an idea. It stirs around with every movement, every thump of his heels up the stairs. He's only half-aware of waving as Bái keeps going to the fifth floor.

His eyes catch on the open space of the storage flat.

(All the things he didn't need. Cabinets. A couch. A desk. Useless stuff.

_Maybe he needs to feel—_)

It must be mid-afternoon now, Daud reflects, looking in to where Crow is sunning himself in the square of living room sunlight. He raised his head when Daud came in, eyes bleary and suspicious, but within a minute he was under again, only moving an inch to follow the arc of the light. He shifts every so often, like he keeps trying to find a better way to lie down.

(He _has_ a bed—though going by how Daud found it stripped of sheets and blankets yesterday, he doesn't use it. All the bedding must have gone for the closet, along with that ratty blanket he had on him when they found him on the shore.

Still—apparently, he'd rather lie here in the sun than anywhere else, and Daud knows from personal experience how uncomfortable the floorboards can get after a couple of hours.)

It takes twenty minutes of rummaging in the mess he's made of the other flat to find what he's looking for, but he gets there, and drags the two carpets to the end of the living room. In passing, he glares at last night's dinner, still sitting half-finished on the table.

“Here, move over,” he says, standing close enough to Crow's face he knows it's uncomfortable; and, as expected, Crow looks up with an irritated squint and rolls to hands and feet. He's only just gotten up that Daud foists the plate off on him. “Finish up, you missed lunch.”

The carpets, unrolled, are hideous—one thick and dark in orange tones, the other looking like a bathmat—but they're large enough to lie on. His back to the corner, Crow digs into the food with apparent ill will. It's gone in five minutes. Daud smirks to himself, making a final adjustment.

“Done.” He motions for the plate, and Crow hands it back absently, inspecting the carpets occupying his floor. “You'll sleep easier on that.”

Crow looks at him, sideways and assessing, and sits, with slow, measured movements, in the middle of the blue carpet. Daud holds the stare, uncertain if the message is getting through.

“I know you left the apartment while I was gone,” he says. Crow's focus immediately sharpens, shoulders hitching up in defense or as a precursor to escaping, and Daud blurts, “No, that's not—”

Crow hesitates long enough for Daud to shove his hands in his pockets, eyes straying to the window.

“I'm not accusing you. Or—kicking you out, whatever you think this is,” he grits, and he thinks he can see, on the edge of his vision, Crow settling back down. “You're... welcome, here. Like I said, you live here now.”

Movement in the corner of his eye. He glances back, and Crow's looking at him askance, eyes narrowed. Daud's lip curls.

“Yeah, not my best moment—but let's be clear.” He turns, arm crossed. “Stay as you are, and the first cut you get is going to develop an infection. I don't know how you managed to repair the shelf without going into septic shock.”

A huff, those steady eyes finally looking away, but none of it feels like giving in. Daud sighs.

“Thanks, by the way. For the shelf. Didn't take you for a carpenter.”

Crow shrugs and holds up his hands, flexing the fingers. _Good with your hands,_ Daud thinks, and leans back against the wall. He's fucking tired. It shouldn't be this hard to be honest without digging into people's soft spots.

He can feel Crow's eyes on him again, always watching.

(It reminds him of that strange, hunched mass on the Wrenhaven's shore, turning towards the kid like something starved—how Crow had stared at him on his last visit, ignoring the nervous hands wielding comfort like an unfamiliar tool. He looks; dark eyes meet his. They're calmer, less hungry. A weight gone.)

“Come down to dinner if you feel up to it,” he says, “Everyone else wants to meet you,” and goes.

Sleep lifts, and his dreams fade, an afterimage of light blurring out of recognition. The carpet shuffles under his dragging feet, and the corridor creaks. Everything feels old. He presses a hand to his eyes and steps into the living room.

The world outside is clouded and damp. He reaches the front door, checks the lock—secure. Drizzle spatters the window as he comes close. He checks the frame, the mechanism—secure. Crow's door, once he's made his way back in the hall, is open a fraction, but he knocks anyway. A handful of seconds pass before the answering knock comes, muffled but there.

Crow pokes his head out of the closet as he's testing the window, and unfolds himself to come and frown at Daud's work.

“I'm checking points of entry,” he explains. One of Crow's eyebrows twitch, followed by a vague jerk of his chin in the window's direction as if to say _obviously._ The _why_ is implied.

Daud grunts, heading back for the kitchen. It's days like these he misses coffee. Might even go downstairs, throw a single serve into a mug of boiling water, taste some caffeine. “I know it's useless,” he says, and takes a box of cereal from the back of the cupboards he never uses. Zero effort breakfast it is. “Old habit, helps me wake up in the morning.”

When he turns, Crow's eyes flicker across his face; Daud pours the cereal into two bowls to cut off any remarks about how he looks right now. “Here. Share the misery.” Last, he opens the cabinet by the long-empty fridge and pulls out the first newspaper he touches.

Bringing out the carpets was a better idea than he expected: he's almost at ease sitting in his spot by the window, bowl on one knee and newspaper folded flat against the other. Crow stares, wide-eyed, popping Fruit Loops one at a time into his mouth.

“What?” Daud says, “You want the sudoku?” and takes a smug spoonful of cereal, the pencil held out invitingly. It tastes like lightly sugared death. His only satisfaction is Crow's miffed glare as he goes back to lounging full-length on the dark carpet.

He spends his morning working through the crossword, every so often seized by the impulse to ask Crow the answer to forty-six down, _Gristol-born poet,_ or seventy-one across, _fruity beverages,_ and stopping himself just short. It grows tiring, eventually. He gives the street below a cursory scan, and dives back into his book.

Knocking on the front door, just like yesterday—three short taps, exactly spaced, which must be Bái. That's two visits in as many days. There might be a change in the air, one not having to do with the building storm.

Daud opens the door to Bái standing on the stoop with a package in her hands.

Her mouth curves into the smallest of smiles. “I've been—” She cuts herself off, stiffening with focus as her gaze darts over Daud's shoulder. Crow is still there at the window; he's only rolled to a crouch, stare frank and appraising.

“Good to meet you,” Bái says. “Though I think,” she adds as Crow's hand lifts like he's going to wave, “That greetings should be made from not so great a distance.”

He draws himself up. It's harder to ignore how unkempt he is when he has Bái in front of him with her neatly buttoned printed blouse.

Bái has to look up quite a ways to see his face, even as he stands a couple of steps away. “Mmm.” The parcel is held out like an offering. Crow reaches for it, careful, and Bái lets it go into his palms. She doesn't remark on his half-step back—the curling of his arms around the package—and only folds her hands in front of her.

“For the coming winter,” she adds as only explanation, “I guessed at the size,” and Crow unwinds a short red scarf from around a thick pair of socks.

He doesn't quite lock up—Daud can see Crow's eyes dart along the floor and only fleetingly up to Bái, his fingers clenching then releasing in the wool, but when one hand lets go it barely starts sketching a gesture before stopping again. A glance at Daud, almost too fast to catch.

“He says thanks,” Daud cuts in, and Crow looks Bái in the eye and nods.  
Parts of her face pinch, but she nods back. “It's nothing. I have too much time to kill.” A nod that almost bends into a bow. “Hudié Bái.”  
Crow's struggle to balance the unmade package while he signed would have been funny, if it didn't end with him dumping it in Daud's arms.

“I'm not your coathanger,” Daud mutters, and Crow ignores him utterly to recreate the bird from days ago.

Bái smiles a little, says, “Ah,” then nothing more.

When Crow has vanished with his gift and Bái stands on the threshold, she tells Daud, “I like what you have done with the place,” looking pointedly at the carpets by the window.

He thinks of telling her, _He sleeps on the floor, it gets cold in winter,_ and something in him balks. Instead he says, “Thought it could do with some color.”

Ms Bái doesn't glance at his drab workable clothes, nor at the blank off-white of the walls and featureless kitchen. She holds his gaze, steady as always—and something in that look tells him that, in whatever way, this is just as damning.

The socks are warm. Corvo wears them while he sleeps, but tucks them in a corner of the closet once he wakes; walking without being able to feel the texture of the ground jars him. (The scarf is warm too, and soft. He curls up with it pressed to his face, breathing into the wool, until his heart seems to beat in his head, his forehead and cheeks pulsing, his ears full of the sound.)

Through the ceiling, and sometimes outside the door, the muffled noise of people moving, living. Ms Bái doesn't visit again. The stranger— The boy— Mark does. He uses the name Corvo had given Daud, sitting a little like a question in his mouth, and reaches out once, like he means to touch Corvo's threadbare shirt, or grab the lapel of his coat—Corvo jerks away. Mark— The stranger—hangs back, mouth narrowed as though he'd had something to say that he can't anymore, and as he pushes a hand through his hair he looks at Daud, reading by the window.

Daud glances back at him, impassive.

(There are things Corvo wants to tell him but he cannot he _cannot_ he can't, not with the world around him like it is not with the noise and the silence, not with this intangible hole in his throat. His lack of response is a close enough substitute. He thinks that what he feels is, in part, resentment.)

Mark tries to face Corvo and smile. He's starting to see the stiffness in it. Unpracticed? Uneasy? It sits there, between Mark's nose and the pale point of his chin, looking borrowed.

The door closes. Safe is a strange word to him, but here, with Daud quiet and still in the other room, he's starting to get a hold of it again.

On the bed Corvo stripped of sheets and blankets the clothes sit, still folded. Two shirts, buttoned, plain dark colors. A pair of jeans. The belt is looped around his waist, under the shirt and just beneath his ribs. It digs into his stomach when he bends. He is always certain it is there.

(The shirts felt soft in his hands when he unfolded them, soft in the way clean things are, and smelled only a little dusty. He had fingered the hem of his own shirt, then: worn, stiff, stained, two buttons missing, holes at the elbows and sides. He's always known, distantly, not entirely real, that he must smell; that moment, though, was when he realized.)

The new clothes are clean—he can't wear them like this. It has to be— It has to be right.

Sometimes he can feel the dirt like little insects on his skin. His neck and forearms itch with it. His back burns. The bathroom looms at the end of the hall.

The pump is downstairs, waiting.

(He could make it downstairs, but he doesn't even have to. He could take the jerrycan, pour the water out in the bucket.)

(He doesn't even have to stand on the bathroom tiles and smell the damp air, the press of it. The kitchen is tiled. He could—)

(He breathes the scarf in again.)

He tries to sleep on it. In the dark of the closet, his eyes open again and again and he wonders about the time. Time existed underground, of course it did—time never dies—but it had existed a little like the sun did: elsewhere, touching him only occasionally. In the months where the stranger came to him, he had counted days like he might grasp time itself, no longer certain of its weight. Days and hours had sunk into him with the impact of weeks.

What time is it now? The blankets are warm around him. He reaches to touch what's left of yesterday's meal: cold, but he remembers the taste, the feel of it in his mouth, almost more filling than the eating itself.

Hunger has not yet swelled back up into his ribcage—but there have been times where that was true, and Daud still told him to eat. Still, he pushes the plate away.

If he leaves the closet now, might he still see the stars?

He gives up on sleeping. The closet door rattles only a little. Through the window, the sky is dark and starless; there is a far-off, titanic growling.

The bed-blanket trails behind him into the corridor. Careful, quiet, he crouches by the other door and leans his forehead against it. The doors are thin, hollow wood. This deep into the night, he can hear the slow breathing on the other side. It settles his thoughts. He leans against the door a little harder.

The shuffle of bedsheets startles him to wakefulness. He's slumped half-against the wall, a crick in his neck and upper back—the sounds are moving closer—

He unfolds, stifling the grunt of pain that comes with stiff muscles, and escapes to the living room before Daud can find him in front of his door.

It's started raining: drops spatter across the window panes, breaking the city into distorted points of black and gray, all morning daylight too filtered to do much but cast a vague pall. The glass is starkly cold under his hands. When he pulls away, the outline of his fingers stays, pale condensation. Behind him Daud riffles through the cabinets, graceless and loud.

Maybe the rain could help, Corvo thinks, still close enough to the window that his breath fogs the glass; could make it.... accidental. He'd only have to stand there, and let the storm take what it wants.

Daud thumps down in his usual spot, bowl and newspaper in hand. Corvo eyes the bowl with a skeptical squint. Daud huffs, and tilts it to show him what looks like a couple of crumbled energy bars. (He'd tried one from those Daud had dropped in his pocket. It was good.)

“That way it feels like breakfast,” Daud says, drawing back. “Nothing else left anyway.” He glances out to where the street almost gleams with water, and in a low mutter, like it's meant for himself, adds, “Don't know what's going to be left of the orchard. Hope the others thought to make preserves.”

Corvo knows enough about Daud by now to think, curious, that this is more than he usually talks. The book he's gotten halfway through lies by his leg, still untouched. Daud isn't looking at him. Still, Corvo can feel the weight of his attention.

A glance, finally. Corvo meets it head-on.

“Wish you'd talk,” he says, steady and deliberate. Corvo crouches by him and splays out his hands, the meaning clear, but Daud's mouth twitches at the corner, too dry to be a smirk. “I have the kind of questions you can't answer with your hands,” he shoots back, and Corvo lets them drop, gaze flat, but Daud still doesn't look away. His expression turns assessing. “You eat yet?”

Corvo makes two short motions—palm to his stomach, wrists crossed, _not hungry_—but before he's even finished Daud bounces a piece of breakfast off his forehead.

“Eat something,” he orders. Corvo bares his teeth, but gets up with a crack of kneecaps.

He makes a point of opening and closing the cupboard doors as disruptively as possible, barely less than slamming them, but Daud is almost nose-deep in his book on the other side of the living room and staunchly ignoring him. Crinkling every plastic bag in the emergency rations cupboard doesn't even generate a twitch.

Corvo finally takes a bar from his pocket—less of a problem in the rain than chips—and glances at Daud's turned back, his stiff shoulders, the tiny shift of his hips when he changes position, watching for a change as he opens the front door. The latch releases. The door eases ajar. Nothing.

The landing is dark, lights long since out of commission, the windows in the stairwell partially blocked. It's not a problem. He is used to moving in the dark.

Ms Bái's floor is quiet, no sound of movement, and Corvo hesitates as he passes the other flat. The door that had hung off its hinges is gone, now, the open and scarred frame giving onto empty rooms. A part of the floor looks darker than the rest.

Corvo doesn't lean in, but there's something to the smell in there that makes his hackles raise, an impression that settles over the whole of the landing like mist on the river. He pads up the next flight of stairs.

The sixth floor is silent, too, but for the drumming of the rain, a drowning-out of sound seeping down from the roof. He takes the last steps. Water stains the cement of the landing, the door to the roof propped open, and outside is a great sheet of gray broken by the lined-up silhouettes of plants he doesn't know how to recognize. Corvo crosses the threshold, drizzle already stinging his hands. In a handful of seconds the front of his clothes is soaked. The grit of the roof grates under his bare feet.

There is a shape moving amongst the plants, holding something over its head. Corvo shuffles closer, pants clinging to his legs with rain.  
The shape half-turns, jerks—drops the umbrella—reaches for its belt—

Even in the rain, the cold metal shines—


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _He stands there, trying to decide between making a quick trip—down the stairs, to check where Crow's gone—and going back in. The nape of his neck prickles like the instant before lightning strikes—_  
—and the yelling starts.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry for the long chapter? i like having three

The first inkling Daud has that something is wrong is the damp, prickling breeze at his back.  
When he looks, the front door hangs open. The landing beyond is dark. Gusts of wind whistle through the stairway railings, faint and far away.

The crumbled bars starts to taste sour in his mouth; he sets the bowl down—flips the book closed and leaves it by the window, too, and pads quiet to the open door. Instinct wants him to be cautious, like it can feel something waiting in the wings.

Crow must have gone out. (Why? Where has he gone to?) Only forgot to close it behind him. Daud steps over the threshold; the wind eels down his collar, between his jacket and the waist of his pants. (Did Delilah leave the roof door open again? She knows not to when there's a storm.) He stands there, trying to decide between making a quick trip—down the stairs, to check where Crow's gone—and going back in. The nape of his neck prickles like the instant before lightning strikes—

—and the yelling starts.

It starts out low, hoarse, one short and brutal cry echoing down the halls and then goes _loud_—ongoing, rising not in pitch but in sheer volume and like savage punctuation someone else shouting _“Shut up! Shut up— Fuck—”_ and the gaping howl cuts off as Daud swings off the second flight of stairs and barrels up the last to the roof.

Delilah throws Crow back against the railing, and the knife on the ground is slick and dark—  
“What the hell did you do,” Daud snaps, slotting himself between her and Crow who crouches, huddled, back pressed to the rail.

“He came out of nowhere looking like some crawling horror, what was I _supposed_ to do—”

They're both drenched—it's pouring enough on the roof for it to be streaming inside and trickling down the stairs—and though it's muddled by rainwater there is clearly a cut down Crow's cheek, under his eye, nicking his jaw, blood clouding down his neck and staining his collar. Daud grimaces, reaches for Crow's chin to check the damage—says over his shoulder, “Go home and get dry—” but Crow flinches back then stills, gray under the sheen of the rain, hand clenching convulsively on his shoulder.

“Let me see.” Crow shakes his head.

There's another stain spreading from under his palm.

_Shit._ Daud turns and Delilah's still there, the knife in her white-knuckled grip, its blade too wet with blood for the cut down Crow's cheek. Daud fixes her with a stare, incredulous, teeth almost bared— says, “You  _stabbed_ him—”

and she hisses, tight as a trigger and near snarling, “He came right at me, and out of  _nowhere_ —”

“You _stabbed him._ What if it'd been—the kid, or Bai—”

“I'd have recognized— He looks like he came out of a dump! If he doesn't want extreme prejudice then maybe he should _wash his hair_—”

—and the kid chooses that time to dash up the stairs and ask, “What's going on?”

His eyes flick to each of them: Copperspoon bristling and defensive, Daud about to rear up, Crow, hunched and stiff—the blood on his face—

They flicker to Crow's shoulder. To the knife in Copperspoon's hand.

“O— Oh,” he says.

He zeroes in on Daud, who draws himself back and stands, ready to take the situation in hand, but the look on the boy's face is less question than command. “You know how to do stitches,” the kid says. Daud nods and the kid is moving, taking Copperspoon by the wrist, undeterred by neither her flinch nor the momentary digging in of her heels. “I'll go and tell Mrs Bai everything's fine.”

Shit, she must be waiting by her door, terrified of the yelling—

Copperspoon stops fighting, only shooting Daud one last glance before disappearing down the stairs. He ignores her in favor of leaning back towards Crow; doesn't try reaching, just nods at where Crow is pressing on the wound. “Let me see,” he rumbles, shucking off his jacket. Crow makes some low noise deep in his throat and peels his hand away from his shoulder, jaw tight with pain.

It doesn't look good. Daud knows that knife; it's not that sharp, more liable to tear through muscle than cut, and the puncture is bleeding freely. He takes off his jacket, balls it up and pushes it against Crow's shoulder.

“Keep it there.”

On the way down, Crow hardly looks up from the floor, shoulder curved in like a shield. The boy is waiting for them by Daud's door, standing right up against the wall with his hands in the small of his back; he straightens as they come closer.

“I want to help,” he says as they come through the door. Crow's eyes flicker: to each side, then his feet, chin tucking in.  
“Then bring me a boiled dishtowel and the bad alcohol,” Daud answers, the tired weight of the words only half-feigned. “For the rest, you'll just get in the way.” He closes the door behind him.

The rain still drums against the window, but otherwise the flat is back to its usual silence.  
It should feel familiar, maybe even comforting. It doesn't. He remembers that howl, the way it had expanded to swallow every inch of space—the way it had torn and crawled and withered into him—and the absence of sound feels... not even hollowed. Flattened. Crushed and unrecognizable.

Daud ushers Crow through the hall, to get him into the bathroom—

Crow instantly fights back, heaving all of his weight against Daud's hold—it's more than he expects and he goes down hard, Crow's sharp elbows digging into him, but instead of taking the chance to scramble away Crow whines sharp and rolls away, clutching at his shoulder.

“Dumbass,” he mutters, getting dizzily back up, but when he comes near Crow bares his teeth, breathing almost loud enough to be a snarl. “_Fine,_” Daud snaps, “The kitchen. Happy?”

He has to support Crow back to the living room, pain leaving him pale and clammy under the blood, and lower him into the chair he kicks away from the table.

“Gonna have to cut that shirt off you.” He finds the matches, lights a couple of bathroom candles on the edge of the table and brings out the scissors. They're hardly necessary; the shirt almost falls apart under his hands, barely more than a rag even before the new tear and bloodstains. Its remains are left on the floor. Crow presses the jacket back against his shoulder.

When Daud reaches for the belt inexplicably wrapped a good handspan over the waist of Crow's pants, he hunches in on himself, breath shortening by a fraction. Daud decides to leave it.

He calls _come in_ to the knock on the door, and the kid comes through with a pan of hot water, dishtowel hanging off the handle, and the sixty-proof vodka they'd found in the back of a cupboard. Motioning to a free corner of the table, Daud sets out his emergency sewing kit and starts burning needles.

The kid moves towards Crow—Daud turns, ready to glare him away, but he's only gathering up the torn shirt from the floor.

“You don't need an audience, I know,” he says. “I'll just leave this to dry for rags.”

He has one foot out the door when Daud calls, “I'll keep him alive.” _This time,_ he adds in the privacy of his head. _Won't lose you another one._ The kid meets his eye, and nods.

Either he didn't notice any of the marks on Crow's body under what's left of the grime, or he expected them—whichever it is, Daud is glad he's keeping a level head. He'd rather have no more than one distressed human being to deal with at a time.

(In the back of his mind, he catalogues the evidence: broad discolorations around the forearms, probably restraints; the swelling of burns low on his stomach; jagged raised patterns down his back, following the spine. Not your usual battle scars, though there's a few of those in the lot. Torture?)

The cut on Crow's face doesn't need stitching, but Daud scrubs away what he can of the blood and dirt with the dishtowel, holding Crow's chin firm as he works; follows it with a wash of vodka and a spray of pharmacy disinfectant. Crow doesn't twitch at the sting; his eyes are fixed somewhere far beyond the sheets of rain behind the window.

A fine tremble has started in the hand he's keeping curled on one knee, and there's sweat on his brow, shining sickly in the candlelight. Daud wipes it away with his sleeve.

Under the bunched-up jacket, the blood has stopped flowing. Didn't touch the artery, then.

“This is going to hurt,” he says, and pries the wound back open to check for debris and bits of shirt. Crow's breath wheezes, but he holds.

The tweezers take care of the worst of it; he gives the skin around the wound the same treatment as Crow's face and finishes by washing it out a couple of times with alcohol, hoping the fresh blood will flush out whatever's left. Crow tenses and releases in waves, eyes struggling to focus.

“She did a number on you,” he says, threading the needle.  
Daud tries to be quick. Crow grits his teeth, and in reaching for a distraction Daud gestures at the few scars that don't look like the tail end of a snuff film.

“Got a lot of those,” he says, and scrapes the dripping ends of Crow's hair away from his shoulder. It sticks everywhere wet. “Are they from before or after?”

There's only one before and after, now. The plague hit everyone the same.

Crow, breathing harsh, draws a little counter-clockwise circle in the air with his free hand.

“Before.” Crow nods. “Exciting times, it looks like,” he says, wry. A rapid glance to tally up what he can see and he asks, forced casual, “Enforcer?”

A broad gesture, clenched fist and forearm horizontal, but Daud has no idea what that might mean other than a no. Not a soldier; the ones he'd known usually had more gunshot and shrapnel wounds, if any scars at all. “Bodyguard?”

A full-body shiver as Daud ties another stitch. A nod. He'd answer anything, as long as it took him away from the pain. Daud wonders, for a moment, whether he'll remember having said anything later, once the pain recedes.

He stops asking questions.

Instead he says, “So, I guess you met Copperspoon,” and is rewarded with a flicker of black iris.

When the last stitch is tied off, he sprays everything with disinfectant for good measure.

“Do you believe?” he asks. Crow's face makes a bid for most tired eyebrow lift. “I'm decent at emergency sutures,” Daud says, putting everything back in the kit, “But you should probably pray.”

He thinks the tap on his arm is meant to be a rebuke. It stays there; Crow's fingers curl in his sleeve like he'll collapse in on himself unless he holds on.

The two spots of too-pale, clean skin on his face and torso stand out like stains next to the rest of him.

“You have to finish washing up,” he says, voice low, gently prying Crow's hand away from his shirt and helping him lean back against the chair. “Or you'll get your scratches infected.” A glass of water, a Tylenol from the box in the kit.

Crow's eyes are barely slitted open; he can see them focus on him a moment, then slide, the flicker of the candles reflecting in them, a sliver of fire. He only just manages to take the glass, drink and swallow the painkiller.

“Or you can sleep, I guess,” Daud sighs, and either exhaustion is catching, or it's catching up with him, his limbs dead weights as he puts everything away. Still, he shakes Crow back to momentary wakefulness, and helps him stumble across the flat to the mattress in his room; gets him lying down, careful not to jar his bandaged shoulder. As soon as he's horizontal, Crow is out like a light.

Daud doesn't have any properly clean blankets, but there is no way in Hell he's putting anything out of Crow's closet near those wounds. He brings his own over, tucks it around the resting giant's feet. He'll make do with the extra sheets and sleeping in all his clothes.

When he knocks on Bai's door, she almost startles him with how fast she opens, sharp eyes inspecting him and both flights of stairs.

“There was yelling. Mark told me no one died,” she says, snappish and anxious, hand tight on the doorknob. Daud shakes his head.

“Crow surprised Copperspoon on the roof,” he says. “She stabbed him. I stitched him up.”

Bai stares him down, and he lets her, unblinking. After a handful of seconds, she deflates with a long, heavy sigh. Her hand flutters like she's only just stopped herself from sweeping it through her hair. “He's—?”

“Nothing major. I'm keeping an eye on it.”

“You look about to drop,” she says, and when he catches her eye he finds fondness, and worry.

“It's not even noon,” he answers, looking away. “I'm not about to fucking sleep.”

The silence stretches—taut, exactly like plastic pulled to breaking. His jaw works. She looks nothing but unimpressed.

“Why did you come up here?” she asks, weary. He gives himself a moment to refocus, rubbing a hand over his face.

“For towels, if you have any I can borrow.” He thinks of how Corvo had fought him not to go inside the bathroom, even injured, and how much of a mess that hair of his is going to require. “I think we're going to need them.”

He mutters a thanks when she hands them off, turning away. Bai says his name.

He waits for _he will be fine._ Maybe _everything will be fine._ Perhaps, even, _you will be fine._ She says nothing more, and he goes back downstairs.

There, on the landing, the boy is waiting for him, his arms crossed, feet planted and apart. Tiredness begins to bubble into irritation.

“What, you want a status report?” he asks, bypassing the kid in favor of the door. How many of these is he going to have to do? Can't they pass the information to each other? A hand on his arm stops him just before he goes through.

“Daud, please.” _That doesn't happen often,_ he remarks, biting back a sigh. “Just tell me how he is.”

“Stitched up and sleeping,” he says. The kid glances in the door like he might see him, tucked away somewhere—or maybe, like he's wondering just how bad it must have been. “I don't think he gets much of it at night,” he adds, voice edging on reassuring, “And I guess getting stabbed doesn't help.”

The word tastes strange in his mouth now—strange in the way forgotten things return, once familiar, too comfortable, to settle somewhere inside. His lip curls as though that might dislodge it. The boy watches him, hand wrapped nervous around his own arm.

“You can see him later. When he's awake.”

He nods. Daud closes the door.

The sound of Daud's shoes on the carpet retreats, muffled through the echo of pain. He shifts in his half-sleep—turns his face against something soft and out of place. Drifts. The constant distracting pull of stitches and deep bruised twinges become a background hum.

He sways up and out of dreaming, feeling thick with warmth and sleep despite the ache that has spread from a sharp centered point all up his neck and side. Rolling to his good side almost dislodges the blanket that's been draped over him.

His throat is sore—the yelling, he thinks—and his mouth tastes strange and dry. He stumbles to his feet with the blanket tucked around him.

The water is in its usual place. It takes some effort not to fumble the jerrycan, but he manages to fill a glass and gulp it down, the cold bite of it setting off a shiver. He fills himself another.

“Awake then,” and Corvo doesn't jump but his arm jerks in surprise, half of the glass sloshing onto the floor. Daud, behind him, grimaces.

A dishrag is dropped to soak up the spill, a chair dragged next to him. The glass is taken from his hands and moved to the table. “Sit down,” Daud says, bringing more things out of the cupboards, “I have to check on the stitches.”

Corvo drops into the chair and finds a bowl dropped unceremoniously into his lap. A fork is sticking out of it, and it warms his legs even through the fabric of his pants. He can't recognize what's inside: it's red, smells full of spices.

“Eat up,” Daud says when he sees Corvo just breathing it in, eyes half-lidded. The steam is condensing on his chin and nose. “I made chili early for dinner. Yours is mostly kidney beans, though.”

He's unpeeling the bandage from his shoulder; Corvo uses that arm to keep the bowl steady, takes a bite with his other hand. He sways a little into the wrist that presses, marginally cooler, against his forehead, and pretends it's the dizziness stirring slow through the inside of his skull.

Under the bandage, the stitches look to have held while he slept, but the skin around them is red and puffy. Crow twitches hard when Daud presses on the edge of the wound.

If they're really unlucky, the knife Delilah used is the same one he's seen her dig in the planter boxes with, and whatever was on it got too deep inside to clear out—or it could be no worse than what he knows of the body's usual reaction to traumatic insertion.

Crow's head is a little too warm; a fever starting up, but he has no way of knowing where it's going to fall between benign and destructive. No suppuration, at least. He'll take that as a good sign.

He breathes out. Hope, he's found, is the worst tool to hold when it's the only one he can use.

Daud makes himself useful and cleans around the wound again, wiping disinfectant between the stitches, doing his best to keep his movements light. Crow's stopped eating, the glass on the table left untouched; falling asleep again? He's leaning most of his weight into Daud's wrist now, getting heavier by the minute; Daud switches to cradling his forehead in his palm, swinging him back into the chair, but as soon as he lets go Crow slides sideways.

He huffs, and comes to stand next to him, Crow's head tucked under his arm while he works. It's easier this way.

(He's warm even through the shirt and the sweater Daud's pulled on since the roof, the jacket left to soak in the shower. When he lolls a little too far, neck lax and unsteady, Daud hitches him up onto his hip again.)

A careful shake of his good shoulder brings him out of his torpor, vague-eyed but conscious.

“Finish your beans,” Daud says, and Crow applies himself to the food.

He thinks this is the closest he's ever been to sleep. The taste of chili fills his head like a cloud. Pain, lancing, that he tries to shake off with a roll of his shoulder—the plastic taped to it crinkles. His hand is closed around a glass and a tablet like the one he'd been given before. He drinks; swallows.

Outside the window, the rain has stopped. Light edges in diffuse as blood in water.

Part of him keeps track of Daud, leaving and returning, carrying armfuls of stuff to the middle of the living room. Crow's chair is dragged a few inches closer to the counter—“Don't fall off—” and the table moved to a corner of the living room to make space for a thin white tarp. His eyes catch on the rings all along one side, and the thoughts in his head dig sluggishly for meaning until he hears the hollow sound of memory.

It's a shower curtain.

He has to empty the shower basin before bringing it out to the kitchen; the jacket he leaves to continue soaking in the sink. Two buckets of water from the pump, check. Might need a third one—he'll deal with that later. The towels. Soap.

He goes to where Crow is finishing the water, the bowl cleaned out and set aside.

“I brought everything out, since the bathroom is a no-go.” Crow meets his eye, looking a little more awake, but his expression is an empty shell. “I left your toothbrush and a tube of toothpaste by the kitchen sink, too, for when you decide to get that habit back. I'm not a dentist; if you get cavities, it's not my problem.” Nothing, still—Crow only looks off to the side, to the window first, then the set-up in the middle of the kitchen.

_You could have told me, if there was a problem,_ he thinks, but doesn't know how well that would be received. Isn't sure it will get through at all.

“You want help, or privacy?” he asks, and the look Crow gives him is almost insultingly blank. He grits his teeth. “Alright. Don't move your left arm, you'll strain your stitches, and don't bother with your hair.”

Crow starts to move; his furtive steps are reduced to an uneven shuffle across the couple of feet between him and the basin, the shower curtain wrinkling under his feet.

“The tub should be big enough for you to sit in,” Daud adds. Crow's only answer is to reach for his belt, and Daud, deciding retreat is the better part of valor, throws, “Don't drown,” over his shoulder as he escapes.

He has work to do. The bedding Crow's been sleeping in lies piled in the closet. He wraps it all in one of the sheets, adds in the cover for his own blanket. _Guess I'm a fucking maid now,_ he thinks.

All the way down the stairs to the basement, he remembers the laughter of his cleaning crew; they would have liked the joke. Their names cut shapes in the dark, distant, like sun glancing off snow.

Crow leaves what's left of his clothes on the floor. He doesn't know where the rest is—the raincoat, mostly, since the shirt was cut to pieces.

The water in the buckets is cold; he scoops it up with the bowl Daud left by the basin and dumps it down his back, another on his front, his plastic-wrapped arm, his legs. Takes the soap and starts scrubbing.

His head is still vague, cotton-lined, but some things are starting to come through again, too sharp. His back itches—he twists, ignoring the pain as the skin of his shoulder pulls, and scrubs there too; throws a bowl of water into his face and rubs the soap left on his palms up his cheeks, across his eyelids, all the way to his hairline; water trickles back down, too warm, from the corners of his eyes, and he rinses it away. Grayish run-off accumulates in the bottom of the basin.

He stands, and steps out of the basin. Hauls it up, awkward, to tip into the empty bucket. The first of the water sloshes over the sides; then it steadies, and he sets the basin back down, sits inside again, starts over.

The skin he's been running from stares back at him, patchy pale and reddened, in swathes down his arms and uneven inside the lower concave of his stomach. He stares it in the eye. It doesn't hurt to look at. It doesn't hurt to look at. It doesn't—

The soap slips from his hand, and he has to lean out to reach it. Metal gleaming, flipping in weak light. Water slops up the sides of the basin. A cigarette sizzling as it's put out. He breathes and the smell is leftover traces of chili, store-bought soap, dirt. His eyes are sore but he keeps going.

At some point there is no more water in the second bucket; Corvo empties the basin again, and drops the leftovers of his old clothes in the spill to soak up the water. The new ones are in the bedroom. He stands there, shivering in the chill air. Looks at his arms.

The dip of his back itches, wet, and his nails catch on the scars.

The sheets washed and hung to dry—the worst of it he left to soak, to come back to later—Daud comes back to Crow standing in the middle of the kitchen, naked and dripping, whole body looking like a clenched fist. Under his scratching nails, his back is starting to bleed.

“Stop that,” he snaps, taking him by the arm and shoving him into a chair. He hasn't turned his back for two seconds to get the kit that Crow's back to scratching. Daud smacks his hand away. “_Stop._ You're bleeding.”

It's not much, a couple of light abrasions, but he disinfects them anyway. “I don't think I need to waste any bandages on this, but if I see you scratching again I'm taping a garbage bag to your back.”

Crow glares, baleful. Daud holds. The water he brought up from the kitchen is on the table, steaming a little, but he thinks this is important enough for that to wait.

He takes a hold of Crow's wrist, thumb on a discolored patch of skin.

“Are these the problem?” he asks, and Crow's eyes narrow just enough for a question. “With the bathroom, I mean.” No anwering movement, but that's enough for a tacit _yes_ in his book. He turns Crow's arm over, following the curve of the marks. “These, the ones on your back—recent, right? Just before everything.”

Crow turns his face away—_stop asking questions_—but as soon as Daud lets go his eyes come back to the marks, an indent in his brow like he's asking some of his own. Daud leaves him to it, and goes to Crow's room.

He comes back with the pants he'd gotten him; drops them on the table. “Get dry and put these on.” While Crow gets himself dressed, he gathers up the soap and the bowl and sets them on the table. “I'm going to wash your hair.”

What that gets him is Crow straightening to full height and a low, hoarse growl, the glare back threefold. The second one is the only thing that gives him pause. He's not sure he remembers Crow making any sound voluntarily until the yelling this morning—now this?

“Don't be an idiot, I know you're not an infirm,” he says, “But if you try to deal with it yourself you'll ruin my work. I can shave it off, instead, if you'd rather.”

Crow hesitates—shakes his head, and sits again.

“I'll be quick about it,” Daud says, and begins.

Crow has to bend his face over the water, the clumped ends of his hair dipping in; Daud cups water over his head to soak the rest. At the first run of water, Crow's hands tighten convulsively on the edge of the table.

“You good?” Daud asks, hand on his injured shoulder, and Crow huffs and nods, unclenching.

Some of the knots are impossible to work free, but he soaps them up and lets them soak anyway. Once he's done with the trailing ends, Daud works his way up to the roots, digging fingers into the mass. Crow rocks a little with the pressure of his hands; his shoulders are starting to unwind.

When he finally starts to rinse the water is only lukewarm and he can't pass a hand through Crow's hair without something snagging, but it's a job well enough done.

Crow swings off-balance when he brings his head back up, probably light-headed from the steam, and catches himself on Daud's sleeve. “Want me to comb it out?” he asks, expecting a solid shake of the head and maybe some tight-jawed resentment, some glower through the wet curtain of his hair, but as Crow gets back his bearings he nods, leaning into the chair again. Daud checks his temperature, just in case the stumble was the fever—it's steady, still mild; he goes to get the comb.

Wet hair sliding over his palms is a haunting sensation. He is caught in the familiar motions, picking at tangles until they loosen and unmake themselves, sliding the comb through growing lengths of hair as he works more of it out. Crow slowly starts to lean forward; Daud pulls him to the back of the chair, but his chin dips, and he doesn't react aside from a slightly heavier breath when the tines catch and pull. Asleep. Daud keeps going.

When he's done he throws the dry towel over Crow's head and rubs, one hand cupping his forehead to keep him steady. Crow seems to wake up, then, head turning and hands coming up for the towel until the stitches pull and he flinches.

“It's over,” Daud says, pulling the towel down to the ends of his hair. “You can have it back now.”

Crow huffs.

It's getting late; the window is dark, a drizzle starting up again, the background patter just audible. Crow returns to his room. Later, after Daud has put everything away and come back from a late dinner with the others, he finds him in one of the button-downs, sprawled face-down on the mattress, the blanket stuck under him and pulled haphazardly back over his legs. He's fast asleep.

Daud sinks into his own bed, but not into sleep. He stares at the ceiling for what feels like an hour.

(Billie was a lot fussier about having her hair combed. Every wrong move would prompt a yowl and an offended glare, and nothing could stop her moving in her seat, yearning to be free. Still, she never said no when he asked, watching her struggle to do it herself.

Crow isn't anything like that child. There is a knot in Daud's chest, strained and trembling; it's one he doesn't know how to work free. He thinks that some days, he might even want it to stay.)

The building is quiet. He lays there and wonders why today, of all days, it's keeping him awake, when he's had months to get used to the ache; why, despite that, he feels cleaned out and loose, on the cusp of empty.

He's warm. Eventually, sleep finds him.

The wound leaks the first few days, leaving faint halos on the bandages.

(The first day, Crow spends stretched out on every surface he can feasibly sleep. Daud shakes him awake in the morning so he can eat the leftover chili, and he sits blearily at the edge of the bed, forking food mindlessly into his mouth. By lunch, he's migrated to the carpets in the living room; the clouds are gone, and he is stubbornly soaking up what weak light winter leaves him.

They'll have to start closing the shutters at night, Daud thinks; he can feel the chill in here.

He convinces Crow to move to a chair long enough to eat something—a cereal bar, and a can of peaches from the kitchen, a spoon sticking out of the open top. Seeing Crow on the floor, resigned to stiff discomfort, gave him an idea; he should have the time to put it in motion while Crow finishes that, considering how slow he's chewing.

There was a couch, in all the things he'd thrown out of the flat. Green, and battered. It will fit perfectly.

The kid comes up the stairs just as he's crossing the landing, and they both stop in their tracks, watching each other. The kid looks away first, scratching the back of his head.

He looks so... normal. A teenager, his clothes a little too short for his body—a young man. There are bags under his eyes, and scruff on his chin, and Daud wonders whether it's recent or he just wasn't willing to see it before.

He makes a decision.

“Help me out,” he says, gesturing towards the flat opposite. They carry the couch through together—easier than having to drag it himself, he'd already risked throwing out his back the last time—and set it down partly over the carpets, at an angle to the window. The sun just about reaches the back of the cushions.

The kid watches Crow, and Crow watches back, perched on the chair with his feet up on the seat. He slurps peach syrup out of the spoon; the kid's mouth pinches, then dimples.

“I'm glad you're doing okay,” he says, and Crow gives a small answering nod.

They leave him to his lunch and his afternoon nap, and go down to the kitchen, where the open window lets in light and cold air. Daud always forgets it's built the same as his own place; the long table, the cabinets lined along the wall, all of it gives too different an impression. There's even a couple of paintings up. He has no idea whether they were always here, or if the others scrounged them from other floors before he became one of them. They fit in well enough.

They sit at the table. Daud looks out to the window; some of the trees in the park are almost level with his line of sight. Everything seems greener this way. From the other side of the table, the kid looks at him like he'd looked at Crow: careful, calculating. Trying to understand. It's no wonder he's perceptive, with all the practice he gets in.

“I'm sorry,” Daud says, “For what I said,” and though it's no weight lifted from his shoulders he feels a little less hollow.

“It's fine,” the kid says.

Daud's eyes cut across to him. “Do you even remember what I'm talking about?”

“Yes.” His face is clear, his gaze direct. Daud breathes out slow through his nose.

“It's not fine,” he argues, but his voice is soft. “You're old enough to make your own decisions, it wasn't my place to judge—”

“You were looking out for me,” the kid cuts in, certain in a way Daud has always found infuriating, but none of the irritation sticks. “You care about people, too. You just forget to do it in a way they understand.”

“Sure,” Daud says, sardonic half-smile hooking into the corner of his mouth.

The kid's head tilts, and his quiet expression means Daud is being especially transparent. He wonders what the kid sees, looking through him: light slicing through the water? The hot and cold currents? The depths?

“Still,” the kid adds after a moment, “I don't regret getting angry at you.”

“Good for you,” Daud mutters, but the kid's not done.

“I had reasons,” he says, and stops. Daud thinks that a while ago he might have believed it was to build suspense; now, looking at him, he thinks the kid's only looking for the right words. “I'm still... We're all—” He swallows. His eyes aren't wet, not like that other time, but the way he looks down at the table speaks.

“It's been rough,” Daud says, and he shrugs.

“I miss him.” He looks back up again. “Sometimes I think I'm the only one who does, or the only one whose missing matters. I know—” His hands come up, interlaced, over his mouth. “I know Mrs Bai loved him too, but she didn't love him the same.”

_Ah,_ Daud thinks, and all the discomfort he expects gives him a wide berth. The breeze through the window is like a bubble of sound and smells, insulating. Nothing else quite exists but them and these words between them. “Must have been ugly, losing him like that.”

“He wasn't supposed to turn,” he spits, sudden, face crunching in. “He was _sick,_ it was a stupid cough, you're not supposed to—” His shoulders pull in, shaking, violence in his clenching hands— “No one's supposed to turn from that, not even if they die, not unless they're _bitten_ and it wasn't _FUCKING FAIR!_”

His fists crack into the table; two drops spatter down on the wood, three, and he withdraws, rubbing the stinging sides of his hands, wiping at his eyes. Daud watches him, still and quiet.

“Yeah,” he says. The kid sniffs.

“Yeah,” he answers, voice scratchy, and lets out a long, uneven breath. “He liked Mark, as a name. I'm holding it for him. I think I'll keep it a while longer.”

“Jesus, kid,” Daud rasps. “That might be a bit much to carry.”

“Just a while longer,” Mark says. “Then we'll see.”

Daud makes them both tea, and they warm themselves until the sun begins to set.

There is a night where Daud jolts awake in his bed, unmemorable dreams shunting him out of sleep. Rather than lie still in his bed waiting for dark or the dawn he gets up and goes out into the hall, where Crow sits in a huddle of blankets, leaned against the wall. Daud knows, from the sounds he's heard, that Crow went back to this as soon as his body allowed; but this is the first time he's stayed.

Daud gets down with a grunt of pain at the door's other side. Crow holds out one of the pillows he's sitting on.

“Your bony ass needs it more than mine,” he says, and gets a faceful of dust and down for his trouble.

He relents in the spirit of graceful defeat. It _is_ comfortable, and the extra elevation makes it easier on his knees when he crosses his legs. They sit together in silence, the stars giving just enough light to limn their silhouettes, Crow's deep, drawn-out breaths almost soothing in their regularity.

Daud jerks back up the wall for the second time, unconsciousness sneaking up on him. His back cracks as he resettles with a groan.

“You were screaming,” he says, mostly in a bid to stay up and aware, “When—Copperspoon, when she...” The words trail off. “Well. You know,” he finishes, weak. The darkness is soft around them, thick and felted. They know blood, part of him thinks; he doesn't need to bring it here. “Thought you didn't—” An ample gesture: talk, or make sound, whichever. Daud doesn't know whether Crow can even make it out, but he does turn his head, the lack of light erasing any expression. Daud looks where he thinks Crow's eyes might be.

He can hardly see anything. Daud doubts he's visible as more than a vague shape, defined by the sounds of his clothes as he moves, and Crow is still and quiet.

“I thought it'd be to startle whoever's coming at you, give you time to disarm them,” he starts, “But that wouldn't work on someone with enough experience, so... why?” and stops, the question hanging.

The touch on his cheek comes as a surprise and he smacks it away, but Crow takes hold of his hand, pulling it down, and presses a finger to the skin below Daud's eye. Better aim than he expected. The finger draws a line down, and repeats the same on the other side of his face, like tears.

“... Walkers?” he says, and Crow taps his arm twice. He'll take it as assent. It's one of the first signs a person is beyond help: blood from the eyes. They were called weepers, before they started dying and rising again. “Yelling won't scare them off.”

Now he's paying attention he can see the sweeping movement of Crow's hand, saying: _No. Wrong conclusion,_ then the slow drawing in of his arms like he's gathering something to his chest.

Daud takes a minute to work out the meaning and the implications, and leans back against the wall. Lets out a hissing breath. “Yell to bring them running?” His breath is choppy in his chest, and he realizes he's laughing just below hearing. “Have them take care of the problem?”

Two sharp clacks in quick succession: Crow, snapping his teeth, and the rough sound that follows must be a laugh as well. _The walkers can eat them for me,_ Daud imagines him saying, and the laughter rises to a wheeze, uncontrollable; fear cannot touch him here, in the dark, high above the streets of the city. “You're insane.” He drops his head in his hands. “Walkers are the worse of the two, you know.”

An expansive noise, like a great shrug. Better insane than dead, that shrug says. Daud has seen him move, has experienced firsthand how quiet on his feet he is, how quick to react. Crow darts and knows how to hide in small spaces—

But walkers have endurance, and viciousness, and a need for destruction.

“You should be more careful,” he says once he's sobered, and Crow gives no answer.

When he returns to his bed, the sky still black and studded, he doesn't close the door.

One afternoon Daud takes the stairs to the roof and looks over the city, binoculars in hand, inspecting the streets from every corner for signs of movement, of barriers moved, belongings misplaced—anything that might tell him something's crossed their boundaries.

In the mess, he missed the monthly supply run—the kid and Copperspoon went instead—and what with watching Crow, and dealing with messes, he's gotten out of the habit of his almost-daily rooftop observation sessions. Spending a couple of hours up here lets him pretend he's making up for it.

Copperspoon comes to find him. Though she's carrying her usual weapons—shears, trowel, what he can only describe as a sack of dirt—he knows she keeps to as tight a routine as he does when it comes to her plants, and he's only ever seen her get busy in the morning. It's a front.

She sets it all down nearby and comes to lean on the ledge next to him. (_I was right,_ he thinks, only a little smug.)

“He must still be alive if you're enjoying yourself up here,” she says, off-handed, and his mood darkens.

“No thanks to you.” He adjusts the focus and sets his sights back on the eastern barricades. There are glimpses of the river visible between the high buildings. “You were rash. It could have killed him.”

She inflates—but seems to retain her breath only to let it out through her teeth. Daud lowers the binoculars, almost surprised. Whatever the kid told her on that supply run—if anything—some of it must have gotten through.

When nothing more seems forthcoming, he hands her the binoculars and sets his hip against the ledge, playing the watchful silence card. Copperspoon doesn't even try to have a look; she twists them in her hands, toying with his carefully calibrated settings, unsurprisingly careless and uncharacteristically on edge.

“You know, I only agreed to come with your little protégé because he knew you,” she says eventually. She means the kid, though it's anyone's guess where she got the idea Daud took him under his wing.

“You never told me.”

“Would you have cared?” she asks, mostly defiant—but he can see the flicker of her eyes on his face, searching. He frowns.

“If this is building up to excuses, I'm going to stop you there.”

His hand shoots out before he can think: catches her wrist just as she reaches the downward arc, the binoculars swinging from the strap she has clenched in her grip, only just missing the ground.  
“None of you _understand,_” she spits, not bothering with wrenching her arm away, getting up in his space— “Not any of you men, and Hudié barely spent a week outside before Moray took her in. I spent _five months_ out there, with the gangs and the walkers—” and he has to block her way with his arm, her skin twisting under his glove, the strength of her violence almost enough to push him back “—and I should be _ashamed_ of what I learned to survive?”

“You should control yourself,” Daud bites out. She goes quiet, panting, wild-eyed—but backing away from the edge of something. They're all walking a tightrope, and he keeps being underneath when they fall off.

“Let go,” she says after a moment. He does. She rubs her sore arm, and Daud thinks she will probably bruise. _You should control yourself,_ his voice says back to him, and he dispassionately stamps out the embers of shame.

“You could have killed him,” he repeats.

“He's new. How much of a loss could it be?”

The air is damp and chill as it slides into his lungs. There is something in him, he knows, that hangs coiled and suspended in the void behind his sternum. It has helped him in the past; saved him, even. It is noting her stance, the angle of her lean, the value of what she has on her, and is calculating the strength it would take to push her off into empty space.

She looks at him. Perhaps she sees the nascent thought reflected in his unwavering eyes. Her hands tighten on the binoculars.

Then her mouth twists, too self-aware not to be put off by what she's just said, and the void quiets.

Copperspoon stoops and picks something up from her supplies, left by a planter box. “Here,” she says, holding it out.

The pot only just fits in her upturned hand. The stem poking out of the earth is slim but sturdy, topped with a fan of what looks like thick blue-green leaves.

“It's just a cutting,” she explains, “For your sewer rat.”

Snarling a comeback hardly crosses his mind, which is too busy considering the terracotta pot now nestled in the cup of his gloves.

This might be some form of apology. Daud doesn't think she's physically capable of saying the words, of course—but he would have expected her to let go of one of her precious plants even less. She only allowed him to water the crops after a month of close observation.

“You could have led with this,” he says, unbalanced.

She shrugs, lacking words for once. “Make sure he takes care of it.”

He realizes she didn't give back the binoculars as he's descending the third flight of stairs. It's unlikely she'll remember to return them any time soon. Rather than climb back up, too short on patience for her usual games, Daud makes a note to get his own back at a later date.

Crow is— not immediately visible, which is a change; he's spent the past couple of days dozing or flipping through Daud's discarded books, perched on the couch in increasingly improbable ways. When Daud comes closer, he sees the crossword he'd filled out that morning spread out on the cushion.

Correction: it's the sudoku. All of the squares have been filled in.

He narrows his eyes, unsure why this is tickling his suspicion, and gives up figuring it out to go search for him.

He finds Crow sitting on his mattress—still bare, even though the sheets have been dry for ages, but the couch might be his bed now. Lined up in front of him are a rubber band, a ribbon and various pieces of string.

Daud knocks twice on the wall. Crow looks up from unsuccessfully trying to tie a string around his hair with only one arm fully functional, and his hands drop, a question in the tilt of his head.  
“For you,” Daud says, holding out the pot, “from Copperspoon,” and Crow takes it, curiously brushing a finger across the leaves. As he leans a shoulder on the wall, Daud adds, deadpan, “I don't think it's poisonous, but maybe you should take precautions just in case.”

Crow's eyes dart up to him through the curtain of his hair—but instead of the derisively curled lip Daud expects, he smirks, a flash of teeth in the corner of his mouth. It wrinkles the skin by his eye. Almost defiant, he bends down and sniffs the little sprout.

“Don't lick it,” Daud says, knee-jerk, and the smirk widens into a thin, delighted grin.

Of course Crow enrolls him into helping, and he spends the next fifteen minutes tying up hair and waiting for a verdict, Crow shaking his head to test how well things hold. The ribbon and the rubber band disappear into Crow's pockets.

Daud inherits the strings. He doesn't even know where these came from; either he forgot them, or they were here before him and he missed them, or Crow has been scrounging outside the flat. He shrugs, leaves them in a kitchen drawer just in case.

It's hours later, as he's about to fall asleep, that he realizes: the sudoku—

The _filled_ sudoku—

The bastard _does_ know how to write.)

The fever subsides; the wound dries, and closes.

(There's a knock on the door, and Bai's voice, muffled: “Are you coming down?”  
“Dinner calls,” Daud says, but instead of staying in his chair or retreating to the corridor Crow takes the ribbon from his pocket, ties his hair back, and follows on his heels.

Daud glances at him over his shoulder. “You sure?”

Crow returns a clear and certain stare.

Bai hardly makes note of him, giving him a brief hello before heading down the stairs—but Daud catches the way her eyes flick to the bandage peeking out near his collarbone. It's the only sign she remembers the very painful reason Crow has not to show his face anywhere Delilah might appear—she must be wondering, like him, why Crow's decided to head straight for a confrontation.

In the kitchen, no one looks up from their conversations until Daud brings out an extra plate and fork and sets them down on the table next to his; then everyone stares, quiet, while Crow takes his place. The only eyes he meets are Delilah's—blunt, unflinching.

Gradually, her eyes narrow, fingers toying with her fork, but before Daud can decide on breaking what seems to be turning into a Mexican standoff she puts it down, bends forward a fraction and gives a lazy twist of her wrist, like a very half-hearted curtsy. Crow scratches his bandage with a pointed moue.

“Stop itching,” Daud says and, unthinking, taps Crow's shoulder with the back of his knife.

Eyes turn to him. On instinct he calls, “Come on, give me your plates,” and officially rings in dinner; serves everyone up; sits down, picks up his fork. The brutal thumping of his heart is slowing back down.

When he looks up, there are two pairs of eyes still on him: Mark's, cool, his expression distant and assessing in that way that means he thinks he's on to something, and Delilah's. She smirks for an infuriating handful of seconds. He narrows his eyes.

Crow doesn't seem to care; he's too busy leaning over his plate, arms in defensive position, as he makes his slow way through a portion of stew.

Daud's initial confusion gives way to a new and improved one: fine, he hasn't casually touched anyone in ages—but why the panic if he just has? It faded as fast as it came, savage as a fight response, no trace left behind. Their stares, he can understand—they had no reason to expect it—though it's a bit much when Crow's the one he touched, and _he_ hasn't reacted at all.

Delilah's smirk, though, is too self-satisfied to puzzle out.

Some minutes in Bai starts up a low discussion about Delilah's plans for the 'water agriculture', and Delilah wastes no time switching focus, immediately detailing her latest thoughts. Daud tries to catch Bai's eye—though she doesn't look his way, he's sure the bait-and-switch was deliberate.

When it ends and everyone has finished, Bai stands up from the table and gives Crow something between a nod and a bow.

“Glad to have you here with us.”

“Amen,” Delilah adds, light-hearted and derisive. Daud works not to roll his eyes.

Once, Daud looks over the back of the couch and sees the front door left open.

His heart leaps into his throat.

The flat went quiet a while ago, the sound of cupboards being opened and closed dying away as the lunch hour passed. There is no way to know how long Crow's been gone. Of course, nothing is forcing him to stay inside; nothing is stopping him from going out of sight, even; this is normal, and expected.

It isn't raining now, but his breathing refuses to deepen.

He strides for the door, calling, “Crow,” and his voice is a whipcrack in the silence, louder than he meant. As if in answer, something in the opposing flat falls with a crash.

Crow's head pops out from over the desk on the left.

“Christ,” Daud says, rubbing his fingers into his eyes; Crow hops down and pads closer, his face uncertain. “It's fine; I didn't hear you leave is all.” He snorts at himself and goes back to his reading.

Corvo likes exploring the flat full of furniture across the landing, crawling into small spaces and wriggling his way through to dark corridors of wood; his shoulder still aches when he pulls too hard on the stitches, but the motions help his arm, stiff after so long spent unused.

The air in here smells of earth, a little. The word he thinks he feels is _invigorated._

He returns a number of times, but after a few passes the novelty wears off, and he looks for other places to explore. It's probably strange—getting knifed, and finding himself all the more curious after—but in a sense he's lived the worst this place has to offer.

On the fifth floor, what had been an empty space is covered with a flowered curtain. Is the apartment behind Ms Bai's, or is it everyone's, like the one below it is?

He knocks on her door, and thinks the look on her face when she answers is surprise. She swings it open a little further. The inside smells clean, fresh, and a little like naphtaline. Her hand lands on the doorjamb, soft, pale as a moth.

“Crow,” she says, looking him up and down. Daud does the same, less often now that he's moving again; she's checking he isn't hurt. He still doesn't know how he wants to feel, knowing these people think of him like this. “Are you looking for something?”

He points at her, and jerks a thumb back at the curtain. Both of her eyebrows rise.

“You... want me to show you inside?”

Not what he meant, but just what he wanted; he nods, sharp, once but eager.

Something changes in her eyes; they look all the wrong kinds of softer as she glances to the curtain. Her upper lip pinches over the lower. Maybe he shouldn't have said yes. There is fear in the way her hand curls just slightly back.

Just as he raises a hand to tell her not to mind, she says, “Just a moment,” and disappears back inside. He waits. When she returns, there is a flashlight in her hand.

“I closed the shutters,when—” and she falters. “Well. We should open them. It will be easier to see then.”

He helps, still more than comfortable in the dark, and when they're finished velvet gray sunlight highlights the dust motes in the air and makes soft-edged shadows all along the floor. The stain he remembers in the middle of the floor is gone. The rug on top is much prettier, anyway.

Ms Bai shows him the little sculpted figures lined up on every surface; some of them are nothing but bits of driftwood, worn smooth by water. She lets him hold one in his palms. It almost feels like skin under the press of his thumb.

There are drawings, too, mostly of a tiny scurrying thing: a mouse, maybe, or a rat, bright-eyed and whiskered. The cage on the table is empty. He doesn't try to ask what happened to whatever lived inside.

It's small, and cluttered, and full of color under the layer of dust.

“We lost him a week before you arrived,” Ms Bai says once they return from the bedroom to the living room. The bed had been unmade, and the wall above it papered in drawings of familiar faces.

Her voice is tired, but her eyes shine like she can see something outside the window beyond the reflections of light on the buildings opposite.

“He got sick,” she says, simple. “It ended badly.” She looks to him. “His name was Molly.”

Corvo nods, and they turn as one to the door. Ms Bai's hand touches his arm.

“Thank you,” she says, though he's done nothing. “Come by for tea sometime.”

He holds the memory of the abandoned flat close—it had looked like something painful, but cherished, hidden full of its small and unimportant treasures—holds it close enough not to want more, for a time, but wanting is in his bones. He has spent too long denying it. The lower floors call; the outside, too, though less loudly, muffled by the touch of light on his face, the sinking chill of the wind when they open the windows—and it keeps him from the tunnels that memory leads to, when it catches sight of the marks on his arms.

It's still morning the day he descends. The flashlight is in his hand; it confuses him, leaves its surroundings too dark, its target washed-out white, but he's not sure there is enough light left in the basement even for him.

The steps are quiet under his feet, the third floor kitchen silent. The broad black crosses on the second floor doors glare at him as he passes. It's already near dark here, though the dregs of sunlight from the floor above let him see; on the first floor, what comes between the boards on the windows is meager. He touches his thumb to the switch on the flashlight, and keeps going.

The basement is full dark. Not only concealing; thick, almost a presence when he reaches a hand out in front of him. He waits a moment, just to make sure there is nothing for his eyes to adjust to, and turns the flashlight on.

It cuts through. In its beam, he finds the pump in the middle of the floor, a bucket left beside it; a row of washing machines against the back wall; a plastic basin much like the one in the shower upstairs, and inside, soap and brushes. This must be where everyone does their laundry. He sniffs the soap—herbal—then his shirt, but it smells too much of sweat to make out anything else. He probably needs to change.

It's on the way back up that it starts: his breath, shortening, feet faltering on the steps, and he stops, too aware of the beat of his heart drowning out every other sound. His ears strain, searching. What is he searching for?

He starts up again, hesitant and slow.

When he reaches the second floor, it's like he's back in the basement—not unseeing, but expectant, the air an intangible barrier. _Something waits,_ everything in him is saying, and his eyes catch on the righthand door.

He edges closer. Brings his ear almost against the wood—but he can't tell anything apart from the thrum of his own blood. The handle turns under his hand.

He pulls, just a little, and the door comes with him.

Wait. Listen. Nothing. He pushes it back in and steps back, frowning, thoughts lining up. If these flats are condemned, why were the doors left open?

Every movement reflexively cautious, Corvo backs up to the stairs. He takes the first step.

Behind him, the door he touched creaks, and swings open. He freezes.

Out of the too-deep dark comes an old woman in a dove-gray pantsuit. Her eyes are lined and clouded, and focused directly on him.

“I don't think I've met you, dearie,” she says in a voice full of dust.

His beating heart takes too much space inside his throat to make even a cursory sound. Everything is fine: she's only an old woman, and blind. She must live here. The door closes behind her, and she locks it.

Her fine-boned hand motions for him to come closer. “Don't be shy, dear.”  
He pads up to her, and only once he's within reach does she hold out her hand. He takes it.

“Mm,” she says, “A strong grip. My nephew rarely makes mistakes.” She taps his hand, and it's like being smacked with a ruler. “Crow, isn't it? Corvus.” Her blind eyes break him down to parts. “Welcome.”

He waits until she's gone up the stairs; hears a door closing on the landing above. His eyes stray to the flat she came out of, and slide away.

When he steps back inside their apartment, still rattled, Daud looks at him and drops what he's doing.

“What happened?” he asks. Corvo passes his fingers over his eyes and stoops with his hands in claws, and he is sure Daud almost laughs, his smirk a bit too wide. “Very Moray, huh? She leaves an impression.”

Corvo nods, and falls headlong onto the couch to get rid of it.)

The fever has gone. The bandage comes off. The stitches start to sink, slow, into the reddened scar.

(Delilah's gift sits on the living room windowsill, soaking in the sun. Every morning Crow tips the bottom of a glass of water onto the earth in the terracotta pot and sits next to it, arm folded under his head, to look at the blueish leaves.

Daud hasn't made the expected dig about watching grass grow. He has standards.

They've started discussing real plans for where to expand into next at dinner, now that Crow is finally looking like he could help out; the logistics occupy most of Daud's free time, materials and barricade movement, protective equipment, how much time it will take them to complete.

They're taking the mall: a narrow corridor of streets and the building itself, only securing exits and the way to the car park. Daud relented. Not much else to do when faced with the fact of their dwindling supply sources.

Daud eyes Crow by the windowsill, and the newspaper folded up next to him. Squints. There's probably another filled-out sudoku inside.

“Crow,” he calls across the living room, “Come over here.”

Crow glances in his direction, raking the hair out of his face; stands, and pads closer.

Daud holds up the scissors.

“Time to take out those stitches.”)

The day after, Daud wakes... rested. He lets himself enjoy it for ten whole minutes before the immediate need to move has him throwing off the blankets and striding out.

He doesn't trip over the indistinct mass stretched across the threshold. He _does_ give it a good shove with his foot. Crow throws out an arm to smack him—Daud dodges, thumps down the hall and calls, “Too slow,” over his shoulder; Crow retreats back into his blankets with a resentful growl.

It takes an almost physical effort not to tap out a rhythm on the sill when he sits, breakfast in hand, at the window. Energy buzzes in him like flies. The sun hasn't yet broken over the skyline, and his eyes can't help but be drawn to the lightening gray above it: not a cloud in sight. No snow, nothing more since the storms, and by now they're well into winter—late dawn, second sweater, bitter cold leeching through the glass.

It is, he reflects, the best kind of day to get back into old habits. The perimeter hasn't been checked in ages. Maybe he could even see whether any of the fortifications can be taken out, used for their move on the mall.

By the time the sun has risen proper his bag is packed—energy bars, flask, a knife—and Crow has migrated to the kitchen, frazzle-haired and at ease, the stiffness gone from him when he reaches for the cupboards.

Crow drops into the chair next to him and tugs, questioning, on the pack's strap.

“I'm making a round of the barricades,” Daud explains. “I'll be back around mid-afternoon—” but instead of letting go Crow holds him back, and taps Daud's boot with his foot.

“What,” he says, impatient, but Crow just repeats the motion, pointing at himself. Daud's brow furrows. “You don't _have _any shoes. This is my only pair.”

Crow stands, ties his hair back, and goes to stand insistently right by the front door.

Daud pinches a sigh behind his lips. He  _does_ know where to find shoes in the right size, inside this building even—he just doesn't want to think of what Bai, or worse, Mark might say if they found out.

“Fine. Wait here a minute.”

He's up and back in five. The shutters in the dead boy's flat were open; it gave him pause, seeing the space in light again—and it also made it easy to find what he was looking for, stashed in the back of the bedroom closet. Crow pulls them on, not bothering with socks, and they seem to fit just fine.

“It's a good thing you have tiny feet,” Daud says, and Crow's bony elbow stabs him in the side.

They rappel down from the third floor; Daud first, so he can keep an eye on the surrounding streets while Crow makes his slow way down. He can smell the city around him, even cold and unstirred by rain. Weak sunlight gleams off of high windowpanes. The wind sneaks into his coat and he gathers it tighter around his neck, shoulders hunched against the damp.

He's lived long enough in this damn city that it's almost soothingly dreary.

Crow lands light-footed next to him, and Daud loops and secures the rope to the bag.

Progress is slow, at first, with Daud detailing everything he usually watches out for in a low voice, but Crow gets the hang of it fast—check for breaches, check for wear, keep an eye out. He tries a car door once, finds it open. The water bottles, once emptied, and the maps and incense sticks are shoved into Daud's bag; the caramels he finds in the glovebox go into his pockets.

Daud focuses on anything out of place, things he doesn't remember seeing the last time he came by. He's the only one to have persevered with the perimeter checks. (It's only half paranoia, he tells himself, the rest being a normal need for occupation.) He could be relaxed about it, but that's not the point of this exercise.

He isn't worried as they near the blocks barring the way to parts of the city they haven't secured. Still, he taps his ear and motions for Crow to look through a narrow vent in the boards of the first.

Crow approaches, stoops to look through, and blinks. Glances back at Daud. Nods.

Beyond the fence, the grating breath of maybe twenty walkers rises in the morning air, unsteady and chilling.

There aren't always that many; further on they find barricades keeping back less than a dozen, and sometimes none—or none within reach, at least. Daud can usually see one or two digging around in a gutter further on.

The next barricade is a car, stacked hardwood furniture, and a mess of chicken wire. Daud can hear dragging steps, no more than two sets, and nothing else; Crow clambers up to higher ground, off on a thought of his own, while Daud makes sure the wire is holding and hasn't been tampered with. A few minutes into his check, small pinging sounds break his focus. A look down either street finds nothing. The noise stops.

As he turns back around, something small bounces off the back of his head, and he whips around just about fast enough to deflect Crow's next pebble.

Crow is lying flat atop a high cabinet, one hand cupped in front of him and the other picking from it, flicking rocks down. His look of focus widens into a grin—then something on the other side of the barrier seems to distract him, and he looks back over the chicken wire.

He's far too visible up there, but calling will alert anything nearby that they're here, so Daud makes his careful way up. Crow glances down once, then looks back to the other side; curiosity tugs, bringing Daud level with him, just long enough to see. Whatever he's found must be captivating—

It's a walker. As he watches, open-mouthed, Crow picks a pebble from his palm and throws it down.

Daud yanks him back and down, and when Crow hisses at the catch of his sleeve on the wire all he can think is _shit, just pray it didn't hear,_ because he can't pray for more to be far away: he'd already seen the horde at the end of the street.

He tugs, rough, furious, almost dragging Crow down to street level, and doesn't wait to see whether the walker they'd seen near the barricade is going to try to climb—if Crow was seen, it's too late—catches him by the loose cloth of his borrowed sweater and hauls—

Crow twists out of his grip, jerking away with teeth bared, and when Daud comes at him he leaps back and out of reach.

“Not here,” Daud growls low as he can, shooting the barricade a glance. Still nothing. He fucking hopes they're that lucky. _A walker, jesus, and him sitting there like so much bait—_

The banked rage is clear in his every movement, but when he motions for Crow to follow he does, quiet-footed, down enough streets Daud thinks he can safely speak at a volume befitting the situation.

He puts his head in his hands. “_What,_” he says, meeting Crow's wary stare, “_In the goddamn,_” forward, backing him up against the closest wall, “_Hell were you thinking?_”

Crow's shoulders are curved forward, aggressive as a cat.

“You absolute madman.” It takes effort to control his breathing, to make his lungs inhale long and slow. “Did you even see the horde?”

The answering glare is less _no_ than _what does that matter_. The world goes narrow and gray, the inside of his chest too cold for anger.

“You saw it,” he snarls. “You saw it and you decided to bring it _right to us—_” He grunts when Crow shoves him back, teeth bared, flexing his fist. The rip in his sleeve is stained dark; the wire must have caught skin, too. He stares at it, the day draining out of him and leaving an ache at the back of his head. He wants the anger back; now he is only deeply, confusingly tired.

“Christ,” he mutters, digging fingers into the bridge of his nose. _There must be something wrong with him._ He should have known. He should have expected— You don't live however long in a storm drain, alone and in the dark, without— “We're heading home.”

Their return is a quiet affair: Daud leading, eyes forward, trying not to focus on the slightest sound that shows Crow is still behind him and failing, of course, sometimes even stopping to glance at high windows so the soft sound of Crow's steps, drowned out by his own, comes to the forefront.

(He'd gotten to higher ground as soon as he could, to check the barricade was still there. Nothing looked to have changed. His forehead pressed to the windowsill, he had waited for the weakness to leave his knees.)

The minutes stretch now that he won't communicate more than the bare minimum, directions given with a flick of the hand.

By the time they reach the zip-line and touch down on the roof, it must be noon, the sun's white glare barely cutting through the cold. Crow touches his shoulder, gentle. Daud shakes him off with one sharp jerk and turns on his heel.

“Do not,” he says, eyes hard and voice rough. Crow's fists clench—anger, maybe—but the way his eyes dart to the side, flickering, says it's more likely he's reaching for words. He holds out a hand, flat in front of him, and with his other index draws loops in the palm.

“I know you can write,” Daud snaps, but Crow taps his palm, impatient, and Daud understands. “Made up your mind? Fine. Let's get you some paper.”

The first place he thinks of is Delilah's, but when she doesn't answer the knock on her door it's almost enough to stump him. He hesitates, thinking of the inventory sheets in the kitchen, and remembers the binoculars.

The handle turns. Daud pushes the door wide.

“Copperspoon,” he calls. Nothing. He doubts she'd ignore someone passing the front door, so she must have gone somewhere downstairs. He steps further inside. There is, he admits, some curiosity lurking under the immediate need to get this over with.

The inside is a riot of green, pots occupying half of the floor space, the rest taken up by stacks of canvases. The colors on some are shattered and crystalline; on others, a shifting flow, mismatched dashes of paint somehow hard to distinguish.

His eye is drawn, helpless and surprised, at the skill apparent in the work. More paintings wait around every corner. A rare few are ominously monochrome.

Crow tries to follow and Daud pushes him back, firm.

“She doesn't like anyone touching her things,” he says. Crow gives him a skeptical eyebrow, lips thin, which Daud ignores.

He's not about to go searching through her rooms; if the stuff isn't immediately visible, he'll retreat, find something else, leave the binoculars for later—but there they are, underneath a small side table, and a fan of draft paper weighed down by books on a shelf. Daud takes what he needs.

Back in the flat, he spread the sheets of paper over the kitchen table. The sunlight coming through the window is pale as glass. They sit, assessing each other like strangers in an open field.

Crow looks down at the pencil, held stiff in his hand.

“I told you to be more careful,” Daud says. That night, thinking of using the walkers as a weapon, Daud had thought he was, at most, stupidly brave; now, it looks more like a new brand of crazy. “You put every person here in danger.”

Crow lets loose a short huff of air, and scratches down a single line.

_What danger?_

Daud stares down at it for a minute, hand over his mouth like this is a puzzle he's trying to work out. After a moment, Crow grabs for the paper and hunches over it, adding more.

The process is slow, his movements painstaking, and when he hands it back the result is hard to read, words misspelled and misshapen. He has to shake out his hand after, like it hurts to write at all. Daud frowns.

“Something wrong with your hand?” he asks, and Crow makes short impatient gestures at the paper.

Deciphered, it says:  _They're half-blind, and I was out of reach. The barricade would have stopped him anyway. Why are you angry?_

“What about the horde?” he asks, and the way he sends the paper back belies the calm of his tone. “And why were you throwing rocks at it?” Crow catches it mid-air, bends down again—hesitates at one point, eyes flicking to the side. This time takes longer, and the more Daud stares, the more increasingly disgruntled Crow gets.

_What about them? They were crossing the far end of the street._

_I thought I recognized him. I could make sure, if he came closer. I knew what I was doing. They never saw me in the pipes. Why are you angry?_

Daud wants to bury his head in his hands. This sounds insane, but—not really. Not if Crow was down there since the beginning. He's gone through a kind of worse Daud has no idea how to parse, but it kept him safe from the hell brewing out here—and this place, its isolation, it hasn't helped at all.

“How many did you see at once, down there?” he asks. He has to get a sense of the scope of what he doesn't know. Crow considers it for a second, then sketches a number.

_Two or three at most._

“Two or three,” he repeats. “I can take two or three—you could, too, I imagine, I've seen some of how you fight. It's not smart, but it's manageable.”

Crow nods, eyeing him sideways. He doesn't know where this is going.

“The pack I showed you, behind the barricade—that was a lot, to you.” Crow nods. “I counted twenty. Dangerous, but not deadly. Twenty can't overtake a barricade. How many, you think, at the end of the street?”

_Fifty._ The eyebrow Crow gives him is edging on challenge.

Daud meets him head-on. “Good guess. Could be.” Crow frowns, back to cautious. “Or it could be seventy-five. A hundred. A hundred and fifty.” His stare is mostly disbelieving, now, bouncing to the window and back like he might see those hundreds in the distance, and when he reaches for the paper again Daud's hand locks around his arm.

“No.” He jerks but Daud holds firm, standing to put pressure on his wrist and keep him there. “You listen to me now. I don't know how many there were, but it could have been more than a hundred at the end of that street. They're been disappearing from other zones, no bodies left behind—it's not a leap to think they're aggreggating.” Now Crow is standing too, staring him down, but Daud refuses to give ground. “I've seen it happen, a wave of those things coming out of the city—”

Crow twists and cracks Daud's hand against the table, and in the time it takes for the bones to stop smarting he's scribbled out a word, large across the middle of the page:  _PEOPLE._

“They're not people,” Daud snarls, “they're _monsters._ Ever seen them come at a wall when they know there's fresh meat behind it? The first ones get crushed against the barricades, and the others climb the corpses like a ladder until they can jump over—and that's for something twice the size of our barriers, real fortifications, not cars and stacked-up IKEA furniture.”

Crow's shoulders are up, Daud's breaths coming too fast, too ragged, the words relentless. “There was a town some miles up North, barely a village.” Crow is backed up in a corner, too focused on him to think of escaping. “They ripped everyone apart. Not for food, not for territory—maybe there is no reason. Maybe you struggle forward until the wrong thing happens across your path. That's all they are. Wrong things.”

There is a calm in him, in them both, but Crow's, he thinks, is that of a mind letting it all click, and his own is a tempering void.

“They didn't notice you in the pipes because it's dark,” he says, steadying, “And the ambient sounds and smells kept them from tracking you. That's all. Once the one behind the barricade saw you, it would have tried to climb, and all the others would have come running at the noise, and everyone here would be dead.”

The couch is right by him; he shakes the numbness from his hands, takes a heavy step and falls into it. It creaks under him. He stares, unfocused, through the gray beyond the window. “That's why I'm angry, Crow.”

It's the adrenaline comedown, he thinks, finally hitting him. He doesn't float; there is simply very little connecting him to the couch, the air, the texture of his clothes on his skin.

A chair is set in front of him, topped with two glasses like the world's worst coffee table. One of the glasses is pressed into his hand. He drinks. It's water. He yearns for something stronger.

His other hand closes around a folded piece of paper. On it, in thick block letters:  _I'm sorry._

“I know,” his mouth says for him.

As he sits, the light coming through the window changes, slanting and arcing across the floor. Slowly, he lets himself feel the bite in the air, and the too-solid heat of his socks and hiking boots. He's sweating a little under his layers.

A bowl of chips and a cereal bar are dropped unceremoniously into his lap.

“What's this?” he asks; Crow's only answer is to bring his pinched fingers to his mouth, but Daud had got that already. He realizes, distantly, that lunch must be hours behind them.

His glass has been refilled for him; he drinks, and digs in. A moment later Crow is back with the paper. Daud takes it from his offering hand.

_My real name is Corvo,_ the text says. The letters smudge under his thumb.

“Corvo,” he says, and Corvo nods. “Okay.”

It sounds like everyone's already in the kitchen by the time Daud heads downstairs; Crow—Corvo—behind the closed door of his room, had answered Daud's reminder with a double knock, which he'd taken to mean  _i'm coming_ until he was still standing around waiting ten minutes later.

At the table, Delilah pins him with a glare that could curdle milk. She definitely knows he went into her apartment uninvited, but she doesn't accuse him yet, so he doesn't try to justify himself by telling her he only took some paper and his binoculars back. He knows he's in the wrong on this one, though his ego chafes at the thought of apologizing.

As Bai serves everyone a plate, the sound of Corvo coming down the stairs reaches them. Daud glances to the open door. He stops.

Corvo hadn't just been messing with his hair.

(Somewhere inside him, a chain reaction of thought as he straightens: _who is this—where's my knife—Corvo—safe_ and, inane, _that's his face I'm seeing._ It's sharp, the cheekbones too defined, skin pale under a lingering five o'clock shadow, but he can _see_ it: the line of the jaw coming down to the chin, the roots of his hair at his forehead and temples, the divot under his lower lip.)

“You missed a spot,” Mark says, touching the angle of his own jaw. Corvo rubs at the patch of bristles, the crow's feet of his eyes dug deep with embarrassment, and sits at the table.

“You look better like this,” Bai adds, handing him his plate, and the corner of his mouth hitches into a smile.

When Daud turns back to Delilah, the focus in her eyes has changed, but not to look at Corvo; narrow, they stare Daud down like they can cut right through him. He eats slowly, glaring back. Better not to let her think she's found some kind of upper ground.

The first thought Daud has as he heaves himself up and out of bed is for the day's supply run; Mark's been taking point on enough of them lately—it's time Daud started carrying his weight again—and since Bai still hasn't shown interest for it, and it might be a little early for Corvo to be putting much weight on that shoulder, Delilah is definitely going to be his partner.

He stretches the last traces of sleep from his limbs as he passes the huddle of blankets camped out by his door. It's impossible to tell, through the layers, whether Corvo is awake; just in case, he makes his steps as quiet as he can.

With Delilah as his partner, he has to ask himself what to do about last night. They need to be on the same level, not working at odds, and he can't say his trespassing did much work in his favor.

It's not entirely a question of trust—trust is a bit much to ask of him, and he supposes anyone else—but they all have a better chance of surviving if the rest of them survive, too. The trick is remembering that when they get on each other's nerves.

He could apologize; explain his reasoning, his need in the moment— He bares his teeth on automatic. The mere thought of it grates.

The knock comes. When he opens, Delilah is leaning against the wall looking half-bored and mostly impatient. The bag she throws at him has a sketch pinned to the strap: their planned itinerary.

“You can keep it when we're done,” she says, her tone off-handed and her eyes predatorily focused, “Since you need paper so much.” He can feel his own jaw tick. Carefully, deliberately, he keeps anything else from showing on his face.

Most times he's the one with a plan, packed and ready to go, knocking on his partners' doors—she's trying to get a rise out of him.

“I have my own bag,” he says, deflecting. “Be out in a minute.”

It takes him slightly longer than that to finish his breakfast and gather everything he needs, Delilah looking in all the while. Corvo's gone from the hallway when he heads through—gone to his closet, probably, far away as he can from Delilah and her knife. Daud hasn't missed the way he keeps an eye on her whenever they're in the same room.

Bag on his shoulder and plan in his pocket, he waves her out of the way and shuts the door firmly closed behind him.

“Let's go.”

“You took your time.”

“You were early.”

She laughs, and he lets himself relax a fraction. She probably isn't going to make this trip untolerably miserable.

Delilah drops her pretense of taking the lead once they're past the barricades, dropping back to walk beside him. Ten minutes pass in silence, the both of them on the lookout for walkers that might have made it past their defenses, before Delilah finally starts talking.

“Your sewer rat cleans up nicely when he tries.”

He doesn't answer, and keeps his pace steady. She's watching him out of the corner of her eye.

“Were those clothes yours or did you pick them out for him?” she adds, an odd light in her gaze. He shoots her a dour frown. “Giftwrapped like that, he's almost tempting.”

“Don't get a mind to sink your claws in him.”

It's the wrong thing to say. She tilts her head forward, predatory, and says, “What, jealous?” Her smile is a slit full of teeth. “I'll sink my claws where I like, and _especially_ in that particular snack.”

“Don't start this up,” Daud orders, unshakeable. “He has enough on his plate to deal with.”

For a second, she looks... disarmed—uncertain, almost, as though faced with something unexpected—then the mask is back, the falsely passive face and surface smirk.

“I'll have to find him a new nickname.” Her smile is slick and teasing. “It's much harder to take him for a drowned rat now he doesn't look like you dredged him up from the bottom of the river.”

The need seizes him, to tell her that Corvo's a grown man, not some animal—and he remembers the times he made the comparison himself: cat-footed, or perched like a bird on the back of the couch. He doesn't know whether to be discomfited, or fond. Corvo certainly plays on that part of what people expect from him; Daud has caught him out smiling to himself often enough to know it.

“It would've been the kid dredging him up,” he says, half-smile and a sliver of humor. Delilah's face shifts in fractions.

“That's what he looked like, you know,” she continues as though she hadn't heard him, “On the roof. A dead thing.”

The half-smile drops. He watches her out of the corner of his eye. “A walker couldn't have gotten in.”

“Reflex,” she counters. “The dark, the rain.” She pauses, as if for effect. “So I went for his eyes on the first strike.”

Daud stops in his tracks. The surrounding streets don't matter. Delilah looks him in the face, her eyes a flash of green—sharp in the sunlight.

(It fits the cut under Corvo's eye. The back of his brain shows him, stuttered and repeated, what Daud could have so easily seen at the top of those stairs: an eye split in two, blade shoved into the skull to the hilt. A dead body slumped against the handrail. His chest is tighter than it should be.)

“Whatever your game is, Delilah—” he starts—

“Would you look at that,” she says, irritatingly amused, still ignoring him. “How often do we get to hear you use our first names?”

“It's called respect.” This time, he hitches his pack higher and turns away. “Don't take this for a good sign.”

He takes three steps before Copperspoon cuts him off, sidling to block him when he tries to sidestep her. It makes him want to spit. “What do you think you're—”

“He deflected it,” she cuts in, and though Daud knows she's not half bad with a knife he can believe it; he's seen some of Corvo's moves firsthand— “Skilfully, even—”

“Get out of my way—”

“—So I knew he was human when I went for his neck.”

(The damage to his shoulder transferred to his throat; gaping, red and empty, everything spilling down his chest, spreading on the floor—)

The sudden void inside him shoves aside all other thoughts.

“If this is a threat,” he says slowly, “To get back at me for entering your flat, I think you should pick another target.”

“I don't know...” She observes him with false consideration. “Looks like just the right target to me.”

They're standing in the middle of the street, cracked tarmac under their soles, the wind stinging where it blows on the cold sweat that's sprung up at the back of his neck. He can see no walkers in the direction he's facing, and he dares to hope Copperspoon is paying enough attention to the other end that they won't have a problem on their hands.

The knife weighs heavy on his belt.

“We have work to do,” he says, and his tone is the kind that allows no argument.

The rest of the way is walked in silence. They make a cursory pass through the corner stores they come across, but most have already been emptied of what's useful or non-perishable; what packaged meat or fresh produce wasn't looted has long since gone bad, though enough time has passed that most of the flies are done with what was left.

(Daud grabs two pairs of sneakers in slightly different sizes, mostly eyeballing it—maybe one of them will fit Corvo when he gets back—and five-packs of socks out of a bargain bin. When he looks up, Copperspoon is watching him from the end of an aisle.)

The general store is fifteen minutes from the shore of the Wrenhaven, twenty from the storm drain the kid had found Corvo in.

(Daud finds himself turning in its direction every time he looks up from another row of canned goods, inexplicably drawn. He thinks of the ripples on the water; paper and plastic, debris caught in the flow; thinks of Corvo's face, pale and haggard on that shore and, much later, drenched, leaking blood in dark, diluted lines. When an umpteenth search of the store's pharmacy comes up with nothing he can use or recognize, he looks out to where the green-roofed building he's lived in a good part of the year must be standing, and inside it—)

They set up camp in the same place he and Mark had that time months ago. Dinner is cans warmed over a bunsen burner, eaten fast and without pleasure. An hour later the sky has long since gone dark; neither of them is turning in to sleep.

Copperspoon stares at the pan of cooling water, chin in her hand.

“Jess and I went camping sometimes,” she says, and Daud's hands clench in his lap. “We toasted marshmallows, told each other scary stories. Teenager stuff.” Her eyes narrow, self-satisfied, as she stares at the extinguished gas flame. “I was best at the stories.”

The more she talks, the more the exhaustion that sits on his back waiting to strangle him reaches down, its long fingers curling around his throat.

She sighs, wistful. “I wish we had a campfire.”

“There's no vent,” Daud says, curt, near-contemptuous. “We'd suffocate.”

Rather than take advantage, Copperspoon sneers a little, delicate, and side-eyes him.

“It wasn't a threat,” she finally admits, the non-sequitur locking in someplace that makes his whole body tense. Daud knows that's all he's getting—they're both too raw for apologies, anyway.

His eyes flick up and catch hers, hard, promising.

“You should stop crossing lines,” he says. “Someday it'll land your ass somewhere painful.”

The way her lips stretch into something like a flat smile is almost self-deprecating.

“To be honest, I thought you weren't interested,” she says, uncharacteristically quiet, as though he's supposed to understand. “Should have guessed you were just picky.”

“I'm too tired to be figuring out what you're talking about,” Daud answers, getting up and dusting himself off. “Goodnight.”

“Goodnight, Daud,” Copperspoon says, moving to her own sleeping bag, and clicks the flashlight off.

He disappears a while in the morning; and on the way back, they pass the thrift shop he'd stopped at returning from the library.

Daud stops to look at it long enough that Delilah comes to a halt a yard away and waves to signal he'd better stop taking his damn time. He jogs to her level, but stops again when she turns to go.

“I'm making a detour,” he says, “Maybe an hour, hour and a half. Check that store, and the next street over; we need raincoats, scarves—”

“Cold weather gear, I get it,” she cuts in, impatient. “I'll wait up for you at the bakery. There's always a few rats scurrying about.” She smirks, fox-eyed. “We can make a pie.”

An hour later he finds her in there, cleaning off her knife. There are two rats staining the counter.

“That's unhygienic,” he quips, and as she turns to him she sheathes the knife.

“Shut up,” she says, succinct. “Are you done with your errand then?”

“Yes.” When he doesn't elaborate, she lets her breath hiss through her teeth and doesn't pry—but _does_ thrust a pack of white and gray boxers in his face, which is just as if not more aggravating.

“I don't need to know what your underwear looks like,” he snarls, pushing them away, but the following throw takes him by surprise. They land right into his hands.

“They're for your little bird, idiot,” she shoots back, “Or did you find him a change of clothes in that nest he used to call hair?”

He only fumes for a little while. As far as Copperspoon's ideas go, it's not a _bad_ one—but she better have thought of looking for the raincoats, too.

The apartment is quiet when Daud gets back. Copperspoon stayed on the roof to look over the crops, so he took it on himself to unpack the fruit of their labors; he only thought he might drop some things off as he was passing his door.

Corvo isn't out in the living room, but even when Daud ventures into the corridor and glances through the bedrooms he finds no sign of him. Knocking at the closet doors gets no answer. (He checks under the beds, too, but there's only dust.)

The conclusion imposes itself: Corvo isn't here. Maybe he's stepped out, Daud thinks, remembering the times he'd gone wandering through the building. He unpacks the essentials on the couch and heads to the second floor to deal with the rest.

On the way down, the sound of hissing oil and clanging pans echoes up the stairwell—right, it's around lunchtime, and it must be one of Bai's good days if she's out here cooking, even if only for herself—and just as he's crossing the threshold Daud stops short.

Corvo's there at the stove, spatula in hand, flipping vegetables in a pan with deft movements of his wrist. Bai keeps a close eye on him as she sets the table and watches over another boiling pot. Some of Corvo's hair has fallen loose from his ponytail; it's stuck to his neck with steam, or sweat.

Bai looks up from her work.

“Daud,” she says, putting the plates down. “Is something wrong?”

He blinks, and shakes off the surprise—he hardly knows why he stopped. “No, I just came down to put this away.” He hefts up the bag.

“Here, here—” Bai takes the strap, “Let me.”

Corvo turns and meets Daud's eye. He waves the spatula, the corners of his eyes crinkling as he smiles.

“Crow helped me clean up Molly's apartment,” Bai says as she puts cans away, not quite looking at either of them. “I thought it was a bit morbid, all his things left in the dust—” She stands, and dusts off her knees. “Well. We decided lunch would do us good, after that.”

“Ah—thank you, Mrs Bai,” Daud says as she hands back the bag. The empty flat? Were they clearing it for Corvo to move into? He tries to remember if he'd seen Corvo's clothes out on the bare mattress, the toothbrush by the kitchen sink. “I should leave you to it.”

“Join us,” she commands. “Mark will be along shortly; I only need him this afternoon, to decide what we keep and where.”

Daud's mouth pulls into what is probably a smile.

“Alright.”

He stays, and helps. Mark comes in as they're sitting down. At the table, Corvo hands Daud a strip of paper he must have written before getting caught up in cooking, _how did the scouting go?_ written in his unsteady hand.

“It went fine,” he says. Corvo's eyes narrow, and his finger draws a loop in the air. _What else?_ Daud snorts. “Got everything we needed,” he adds; then, one eyebrow rising, “Made a detour.”

“A detour?” says Bai. “What for?”

“Just this.”

From his pocket, he draws a chunky block of driftwood and passes it, off-handed, to Mark. The kid takes it, careful, as though it might break. “I guess you'll be getting some of Molly's, too,” Daud says, “but since you asked—”

“Thank you,” Mark says, his dark eyes clear.

They clear the table, and Bai waves them off once the dishes are clean. Corvo follows him up the stairs and through the door until Daud motions for him to go to the couch while he puts away the bag.

“I left you some things over there.”

It's quiet for a few minutes, soft rustling coming from the living room; their new coats, probably.

“Try the shoes on,” he calls, and hears the thump as they're set down.

By the time he returns, Corvo's unpacked the socks and pulled on a pair to test the shoes. One set's already been lined up by the arm of the couch, which he hopes means they fit. Corvo takes a couple of steps with the other pair and grimaces, then pinches his thumb and forefinger together with a shake of his head. Too small.

“Didn't know your size,” Daud shrugs.

The coats have all been layered over the back of the couch; enough for one each, the kid, Copperspoon and Bai. Lady Moray won't need one. Corvo holds up the boxers and Daud refuses to be embarrassed.

“Copperspoon suggested it,” he says. “I thought they'd come in useful.”

Corvo's smile is all too sly to be innocent—definitely laughing at his expense—but he puts them back down and turns to the last stack on the other end of the couch. This time, Daud says nothing. Corvo picks up the first book, fingertips trailing light over the binding rings, and only gives the cover a glance before flipping a few pages in. In the photos, the signers are at the end of the alphabet.

“I'm guessing you don't like writing,” Daud says. He gathers up the others' coats to hang by the door; Crow's eyes follow him around the room. “It'll be more practical, anyway, when we're out there.”

Corvo copies a few of the signs, the movements slow, and turns to him. Daud can see it on the open page: the letter he's signing is y.

Daud thinks, _y, why now,_ and he doesn't know. Or, maybe—

(The scene in the kitchen comes back to him: Corvo, bent over the stove; his loosening hair; learning he might be leaving. A floor away feels unreasonably far. They need to learn the signs together, for it to be useful, and isn't Corvo still healing?

_You wormed your way somewhere inside me I'd rather have kept empty,_ he thinks.)

“Thought I'd wait until you wanted to talk, first,” he says, and shrugs. Corvo's quiet regard holds more weight than usual.

He nods, softly folding the book shut.


End file.
